Mexico joins the league of digital superpowers with a new supercomputer

The Mexican government has announced the launch of one of the most ambitious high-tech projects in the country's history: the construction of the Coatlicue supercomputer, a 314 petaflop system that would be more than seven times more powerful than the most powerful computer currently in Latin America. The initiative marks Mexico's entry into an intense global competition for supremacy in the field of supercomputing and represents a strategic step towards digital autonomy, reports AFP.

The new supercomputer is named after the Aztec goddess Coatlicue, a symbol of vital energy and regeneration. Mexico's president, Claudia Sheinbaum, emphasized the public nature of the project: "We want it to be a public supercomputer, a supercomputer for the people."

With an estimated power of 314 petaflops, Coatlicue will far exceed the performance of the current regional leader, the private Brazilian system Pegaso, which reaches 42 petaflops. According to Jose Merino, director of the Digital Transformation Agency, construction of the supercomputer will begin in January and will take about two years. The total investment amounts to 6 billion pesos - the equivalent of 282.17 million euros.

Merino also detailed the main strategic uses of the future computing center:

climate forecasting and weather modeling; agricultural crop planning;water, oil and energy management projects;advanced scientific research;support for start-ups and entrepreneurial projects.

The competition for the development of supercomputers is an accelerated global race, closely linked to the advance of artificial intelligence. Currently, the dominance belongs to the United States, followed by Europe, China and Japan - regions that host most of the systems in the top 10 worldwide.

Even if Coatlicue will not reach the performance of exascale systems, such as the American giant El Capitan (1,809 exaflops), the project marks an important change for Latin America. Europe, in turn, announced in September the Jupiter supercomputer, located in Germany, capable of over 1 exaflop - that is, one quintillion calculations per second.

Although it does not compete directly with the great powers in the exascale field, Mexico is building its own high-capacity digital infrastructure, which can reduce dependence on external resources and accelerate domestic innovation. Coatlicue thus represents not only a technological investment, but also a declaration of digital independence and modernization in a region where access to supercomputers has until now been dominated by the private sector or international partnerships.