In the 1950s, Angers’ traditional industries (slate, hemp, leather, and related trades) were losing ground, and local leaders needed a new industrial path. In 1954, the municipality bought the former Buirette and Gaulard textile factory on rue de la Brisepotière and turned it into a relay site for incoming businesses. That decision gave Angers the first physical base for what would become one of France’s most important computing sites and the only supercomputer factory in Europe.
Bull first operated in Angers at the Brisepotière relay plant. By 1960, the company already employed around 100 people while the city prepared a much bigger move: a 20-hectare site on Avenue Patton, reserved for a modern factory.
The goal was not simply to house production. Angers had to offer the right conditions for Bull to grow: a skilled workforce, a nearby engineering school, and enough room to expand for the years ahead.
Construction of the first phase ran from March 1961 to January 1963, and the plant was officially inaugurated on May 10, 1963. Joseph Calliès, CEO of Compagnie des Machines Bull, during his inauguration speech described it as the tenth factory of the Company, destined to become the first. That day, Le Courrier de l'Ouest headlined: "Anjou, France's leading heartland for electronics."
As activities relocated to Angers, the site kept expanding its output. In 1964, production of small relays was transferred from Vendôme to Angers, where the plant eventually reached 170,000 relays per month. By early 1966, the Gamma 10 Small enough to run in a 20-square-meter room without air conditioning. - direct successor to the punch-card tabulating machine - had firmly established itself as a commercial success : output reached 55 systems per month, and the 1,000th unit was delivered in Switzerland on February 10, 1966. Its appeal lay in an easy transition: the machine replaced several tabulators without requiring companies to overhaul their entire workflow, while its robustness, simple operation and programming, and minimal footprint made it easy to adopt.
By the early 1970s, Bull was trusting Angers with more of its manufacturing, and the site was modernizing how it built computers.
A clear milestone came in 1973 with the Level 64, a business computer built for large-scale data processing and administrative work. It mattered because, for the first time, a "tricolor" Bull computer, designed under French responsibility and not inherited from an American partner, was built at the site from the ground up.
The factory modernized too, adding a robotic paint shop in 1974. By 1978, Angers began delivering its first Level 66, the more powerful sibling in the same family. Until then, all large systems had been shipped from Bull's Phoenix plant in the US.
Success did not remove complexity. At the end of the 1970s, the 64-DPS, an incremental upgrade of the same machine, quadrupled its memory capacity, letting it handle larger databases and more users at once. It sold so well, driven by lower prices, that it quickly overwhelmed the plant's own capacity. The site went through extremely difficult months, and outsourcing some of the work to a subcontracted plant in Toulouse proved fragile.
At the same time, the plant was also rolling out micropackaging for the DPS-7 line, adding further strain on production. These machines were the backbone of everyday business computing at the time, running everything from bank operations to real-time airline booking systems. In December 1981, Bull brought the outsourced work back in-house. But the early 1980s also brought another setback: switching from gold to copper substrates worked in the lab but failed in production due to electromigration.
From 1982 and over the next two decades, Bull gradually broke apart its Angers site into separate pieces: metalwork went to one company, circuit board manufacturing to another, and the factory itself became a subsidiary of its own, under a new name.
These changes came at a cost. In July 1992, Bull cut 396 jobs at the site, a warning sign of what was to come.
In June 2000, Bull sold off its circuit board manufacturing entirely, handing it to an American company. Two years later, in December 2002, 660 people lost their jobs when that unit collapsed, leading laid-off workers to occupy the factory in protest.
Despite the difficulties, Angers did not disappear. The site gradually refocused on high-performance computing, assembling a large range of enterprise servers from Novascale servers Ran everything from business databases to industrial simulation. carmaker Pininfarina used them to test vehicle designs before building a single prototype. to GCOS mainframes Bull's mainframe operating system family. Its programs ran in COBOL, Fortran, Algol, or GMAP assembly, the classic languages of business and scientific computing. A handful of legacy systems still run on it today.
Even as Angers was being reorganized, a new chapter was already taking shape, one that would come to define the site's future. On 29 January 1996, French President Jacques Chirac announced the end of French nuclear testing. To keep validating the safety and reliability of France's nuclear arsenal without live tests, the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) needed a digital alternative. It turned to Bull for its supercomputing needs.
This was just the beginning of a French supercomputing story that turned Angers into the sole supercomputer factory in Europe.
In 2014, Atos acquired Bull to build Europe's leading player in cloud computing and cybersecurity, combining forces to build an offering backed by around 2,000 security specialists. It was also a matter of national interest: those supercomputers were central to France's nuclear defense. These activities weren't grouped under the name "Advanced Computing" until 2022–2023, when Atos restructured and created the Eviden entity.
By 2022, the historic Angers site had reached a turning point. Ageing and increasingly constrained by a lack of space, it could no longer fully meet growing industrial and technological needs or support the Group’s development ambitions.
In February 2022, Atos therefore announced a major transformation and reconstruction project for the site. The ambition was to create a modern, more efficient facility, better equipped to meet the challenges of the future. Production space was set to increase from 7,800 to more than 12,000 square metres, enabling production capacity to double while providing employees with safer and improved working conditions. The project also included the creation of around one hundred skilled jobs, further strengthening the site’s long-term industrial footprint in Angers.
Angers kept moving forward. In October 2024, Angers installed its first quantum computer machine, a 5-qubit machine from Finland's IQM. Until then, Eviden's quantum work had been limited to software simulation. Less than a year later, in September 2025, JUPITER, Europe's first exascale supercomputer, built on Bull's BullSequana XH3000 Exascale supercomputer, designed and manufactured in Angers. First installed at France's nuclear defense agency (CEA), with wider use in climate modeling, drug discovery, and genomics research. architecture, was inaugurated at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre in Germany.
AI marked the next shift. In June 2026, Bull partnered with Foxconn, the world's largest electronics manufacturer, to scale up AI and cloud infrastructure production across Europe. Under the agreement, components would be manufactured at Foxconn's Czech Republic facilities, then assembled, integrated, and validated at Bull's Angers factory, backed by an initial investment exceeding 120 million euros. It positioned Angers at the heart of Europe's push for sovereign AI infrastructure.
The new manufacturing building is set to open by the end of 2026, another step in a story that started as a municipal response to industrial decline and grew into a strategic European capability.