Mexico unveiled plans Wednesday to build what it claims will be Latin America’s most powerful supercomputer — a project the government says will help the country capitalise on the rapidly evolving uses of artificial intelligence and exponentially expand the country’s computing capacity.
Dubbed “Coatlicue” for the Mexica goddess considered the earth mother, the supercomputer would be seven times more potent than the region’s current leader, Brazil’s José Merino, head of the Telecommunications and Digital Transformation Agency.
President Claudia Sheinbaum said during her morning news briefing that the project’s location has not yet been decided, but construction will begin next year.
“We’re very excited,” said Sheinbaum, an academic and climate scientist. “It is going to allow Mexico to fully get in on the use of artificial intelligence and the processing of data that today we don’t have the capacity to do.”
Merino said that Mexico’s most powerful supercomputer operates at 2.3 petaflops — a unit of measurement for computing speed, meaning it can perform one quadrillion operations per second. Coatlicue would have a capacity of 314 petaflops.
