Biography
Raphaëlle Achach is AI Project Manager for AI Factory France at GENCI, France's national high-performance computing agency. She leads AI Factory France's technical support services, user onboarding, and application domain communities, helping researchers, startups and companies access the expertise and resources they need to develop and scale their AI projects.
Previously at CNRS, she managed AI and cybersecurity projects before leading national computer science programmes. She contributed to the launch of the Jean Zay supercomputer, the national network of AI engineers and the AISSAI centre, and served as CNRS General Secretary for PEPR IA, France's national priority research programme in artificial intelligence.
A business school graduate specialised in innovation and emerging technologies, her work focuses on turning national AI infrastructure into practical adoption: enabling access to compute, supporting users from onboarding to large-scale deployment, and building public AI services that meet the needs of research and industry.
Session
- AI FoundationsSpeaker
Panel 19 - From BSC to Brussels: Europe's Supercomputing Bet on AI
Wednesday 23 September, 16:15 – 16:55Panel StageFrontier AI runs on supercomputers — and right now, Europe is on a building spree. The AI Factories initiative is wiring 13 supercomputers across the continent. Barcelona's MareNostrum 5 already sits in the global top tier. National centres are competing for GPUs, talent and political backing, on the bet that sovereign compute means sovereign AI. But does it? We bring together the people running Europe's biggest AI compute infrastructure, the policymakers funding the push, and the startups and researchers actually trying to use this hardware — to ask whether Europe is building real industrial capacity or expensive symbolism, who gets access, how it stacks up against the hyperscalers, and what the next five years of European AI infrastructure actually look like.
With Ziad Matar, Gerald Mullally, Milos Mastník, Diego Perino