Executive brief
On 31 March 2026 Atos Group completed the sale of Bull — its Advanced Computing activities — to the French State, for an enterprise value of up to €404 million including €104 million of contingent earn-outs. The State became sole shareholder of a business the seller sized at about €0.7 billion of 2025 revenue and the company itself at about €720 million, employing more than 3,000 people, half of them in France. Four months earlier, on 18 November 2025, the same business had signed the contract to build Alice Recoque, France's first exascale supercomputer. This dossier reads what that sequence does to a single industrial site on the southern edge of the Grenoble metropole — Échirolles — and shows, from the employer's own job board, that the campus now carries the staff of two different companies with two different owners. Eleven claim families we could not source are named and refused at the end.
I. The transaction, precisely
The seller's own release, dated 31 March 2026, states that Atos Group completed the sale of Bull, its Advanced Computing activities, to the French State for an enterprise value of up to €404 million including contingent earn-outs totalling €104 million. The same document records the arithmetic of the year that preceded it: a share purchase agreement signed on 31 July 2025, then a perimeter adjustment excluding zData, a Big Data consulting business, which revised the earn-outs from €110 million to €104 million and the enterprise value from up to €410 million to up to €404 million.
Two figures deserve to be read slowly. First, the price is a ceiling, not a payment: "up to" €404 million, of which €104 million is contingent on future performance. A quarter of the headline is a promise. Second, the seller sizes the divested activity at about €0.7 billion of fiscal-year 2025 revenue, while the acquired company's own release of the same date states revenue of about €720 million in 2025. Those two numbers are compatible; we print both with their sources rather than choosing the rounder one.
The perimeter matters more than the price. The seller defines Advanced Computing as the HPC & Quantum and Business Computing & Artificial Intelligence divisions, and states that after the divestiture Eviden — the Atos brand the Grenoble-area site had carried since 2023 — retains cybersecurity products, mission-critical systems and Vision AI, with pro-forma 2025 revenue of about €0.3 billion. The Vision AI activities were explicitly carved out of the deal, a separation the seller had already flagged when it received the State's confirmatory offer on 2 June 2025.
II. Read the ladder, not the logo
The company operating on the Échirolles campus has been renamed four times inside a decade of public record, and the most recent rename came ten weeks before its ownership changed. On 29 January 2026 the historic Bull brand was relaunched — the release describes it as "the return of a historically rooted technology name" and, explicitly, as "a strategic milestone on its journey towards becoming a private, independent company, following the signing of the share purchase agreement with the French State on 31 July 2025."
| Date | Event, as published | Published figure |
|---|---|---|
| 2 June 2025 | Confirmatory offer received from the French State; Vision AI excluded | — |
| 31 July 2025 | Share purchase agreement signed | Enterprise value up to €410m; earn-outs €110m |
| 18 Nov 2025 | Alice Recoque procurement contract signed with Eviden | EuroHPC JU: total budget €354.8m |
| 29 Jan 2026 | Bull brand launched | "Over 2,500 engineers and experts"; 1,500 patents |
| 6 Mar 2026 | Atos Group FY 2025 results | Revenue €8,001m; operating margin €351m (4.4%) |
| 31 Mar 2026 | Sale completed; State sole shareholder | Up to €404m; earn-outs €104m; c. €720m 2025 revenue |
The headcount and patent counts published across those releases do not agree, and we do not average them. On 29 January 2026 the brand launch described "a team of over 2,500 engineers and experts" and "world-class R&D supported by 1,500 patents". On 31 March 2026 the completion release described "more than 3,000 professionals and experts, half of whom are based in France". A vacancy published on the group job board on 31 August 2026 under the Bull boilerplate claims "more than 1,600 patents". Different perimeters, different dates, possibly different counting rules for what a patent family is: three figures, three vintages, printed as found.
III. Échirolles now hosts two employers
This is the finding a reader cannot get from a corporate release, and it is the reason this dossier exists. Because cybersecurity products stayed with Eviden while HPC left with Bull, the engineering population at Échirolles and in Grenoble was split by the 31 March 2026 completion — and the split is visible, five months later, in the boilerplate of two vacancies posted on the same job board.
A full-stack developer vacancy published on 31 August 2026 (reference 548023, location Échirolles, FR) opens with the Bull narrative: "un siècle d'innovation Européenne", "des architectures HPC de nouvelle génération aux supercalculateurs exascale", "plus de 1 600 brevets". It names the site directly: "Sites HPC Bull en France : Échirolles (38, près de Grenoble) ou Les Clayes-sous-Bois (78)", on a hybrid model with what it calls intentional office days. The team is Solution, Design & Architecture (SDA), division Outillage, and the product is CQFD, described as the critical internal application used across pre-sales, solution review, factory and delivery "pour modéliser, concevoir et tarifer nos supercalculateurs" — the tool that models, configures and prices the machines.
A senior C/Linux developer vacancy published on 3 September 2026 (reference 543669, same location field, Échirolles, FR) opens with an entirely different company: "Bienvenue chez Eviden […] avec 1 milliard d'euros de chiffre d'affaires annuel", "plus de 36 pays et 4 200 talents". Its content is Evidian IAM — identity and access management, Web Access Management and identity federation — inside the Cybersecurity Products division, with the R&D team described as "basée à Grenoble".
Both statements can be true at once, and that is the point. Three days apart, on one job board, one physical location advertises for a state-owned supercomputer manufacturer and for a listed group's cybersecurity product line. The €1 billion revenue claim in the September posting is also inconsistent with the seller's pro-forma €0.3 billion for Eviden after the disposal — evidence that recruitment boilerplate lags a transaction by months. We report the discrepancy; we do not resolve it, and we do not treat a careers page as a financial disclosure.
The practical consequence for anyone mapping the metropole's industry: an address is no longer a company. Coverage that counts "Eviden Échirolles" as one employer, one owner and one balance sheet is counting something that stopped existing on 31 March 2026.
IV. Alice Recoque: the machine, and the two budgets
On 18 November 2025 the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking announced that the procurement contract for Alice Recoque had been signed with Eviden. The system will be owned by EuroHPC, hosted and operated by the Jules Verne consortium — France through GENCI (hosting entity) and the CEA (hosting site), with the Netherlands through SURF and Greece through GRNET — and installed at the CEA's TGCC at Bruyères-le-Châtel. The CEA's own HPC pages state it will be installed in 2026 and made available to French and European users in 2027, replacing GENCI's Joliot-Curie.
The two published budgets are not the same number, and the difference is the story:
| Source, dated 18 November 2025 | Amount | Stated scope |
|---|---|---|
| EuroHPC JU press release | €354,800,000 | Acquisition, delivery, installation and maintenance; 50% Digital Europe Programme, 50% Jules Verne consortium |
| Eviden / AMD press release | €554 million | "Overall cost of the project over 5 years of operation" |
A procurement envelope and a five-year cost of ownership are different questions, and a reader who sees only one of them will misjudge the programme by roughly €200 million. We print both, attributed and dated, and we deliberately do not subtract one from the other to infer an operating cost: neither publisher states that the €554 million contains the €354.8 million on the same perimeter.
The architecture, as published by EuroHPC and corroborated by the CEA, is a deliberate act of supply-chain policy. A unified compute partition pairs AMD Venice 256-core EPYC processors with next-generation AMD Instinct MI430X GPUs in a coherent-memory configuration; the CEA states those GPUs carry 432 GB of HBM4 and 19.6 TB/s of memory bandwidth. A second, scalar partition uses European SiPearl Rhea2 Arm processors developed under the European Processor Initiative. Everything is federated by the European BXI v3 interconnect at 800 Gb/s between GPUs and 400 Gb/s between CPUs, in BullSequana XH3500 racks, with storage from DDN and an operating stack combining the CEA's Ocean suite with SLURM, Kubernetes, Lustre, Grafana and Prometheus. Cooling is warm-water direct liquid cooling for the unified racks and chilled doors for the scalar ones. The vendor states that nearly three-quarters of XH3500 component production has been relocated to Europe.
Two performance claims are worth quoting exactly rather than paraphrasing. The vendor states the machine will surpass one exaflop per second for scientific simulation, representing a fiftyfold increase in computing capacity over the previous system while multiplying electrical power by five. That ratio — ten times better performance per watt, on the publisher's own framing — is the entire commercial argument for European direct-liquid-cooled machines, and it is also a claim about a system that is not yet in production. It is a design target, published by the seller, not a measured benchmark.
The host site had to be rebuilt to receive it. The CEA states that TGCC infrastructure works in 2024 and 2025 reinforced the concrete slab to 2,800 kg/m² over 700 m², added 24 MW of available electrical power with about 10% more inverter capacity, and created a dedicated 20 MW warm-water cooling loop for direct liquid cooling. Exascale is a civil-engineering programme before it is a computing one.
V. The seller's own year, for scale
Atos Group reported full-year 2025 results on 6 March 2026: revenue of €8,001 million against €9,577 million in 2024, an operating margin of €351 million or 4.4% of revenue — described as doubling year-on-year from €199 million — a net change in cash limited to −€326 million, and greenhouse-gas emissions reduced by 58% against the 2019 baseline. The release states that 88% of the Genesis plan's three-year savings target was completed in less than one year, and forecasts positive cash generation from 2026.
Read against the disposal, the sequence is coherent: a group that halved its portfolio complexity to restore its own foundations, and a State that bought the part it could not afford to see restructured out of France. The completion release describes the acquisition as giving Bull "a long-term public shareholder, ensuring stability, strategic continuity and the preservation of critical expertise", and the Minister Delegate for Industry frames it as keeping critical capabilities "particularly for the defence industries" in France. The company also states that it operates the only supercomputer manufacturing plant in Europe, at Angers.
VI. What we refuse to claim
No Échirolles headcount, before or after the split — no publisher states one. No allocation of the €404 million, the €354.8 million or the €554 million to the Isère site. No revenue, margin or order book for Bull as a standalone state-owned company beyond the c. €720 million / c. €0.7 billion published for 2025. No reconciliation of the 2,500 and 3,000+ headcounts, or of the 1,500 and 1,600+ patent counts. No inference that the €1 billion Eviden figure in a September 2026 vacancy is current. No measured performance or efficiency number for Alice Recoque, which is not yet in service. No delivery date beyond the CEA's published 2026 installation and 2027 availability. No claim about which staff transferred to which employer, or in what proportion. No job-creation figure attached to the State's acquisition. No price, power draw or component-sourcing percentage for any machine other than as quoted. And no assertion that public ownership makes employment at the site more secure — that is a hypothesis about the future, and this dossier only prints the record.