Supercomputing and Europe’s AI Future
with Cristian Canton, Associate Director at Barcelona Supercomputing Center
About this episode
Cristian Canton is Associate Director of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), home of MareNostrum 5, one of the most powerful supercomputers in Europe. Before returning to Barcelona after 15 years in the US, he led Responsible AI at Meta, working on the safety and robustness of the Llama models, after years as a researcher at Microsoft. In this conversation he explains what it took to build safe large language models with no playbook and for every language, and how BSC is opening supercomputing to startups and SMEs through its AI Factory. He discusses Europe's AI gigafactories and the push for technological sovereignty, how BSC turns research into spin-offs such as Qilimanjaro and OpenChip, its partnerships with industry, and why AI and quantum computing together could unlock a new era of scientific progress.