Mexico plans to build Latin America’s most powerful supercomputer

MEXICO CITY (AP) — 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 capitalize 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 powerful than the region’s current leader in Brazil, José Merino, head of the Telecommunications and Digital Transformation Agency.

President Claudia Sheinbaum said during her morning news briefing that the location for the project had not been decided yet, 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 to measure computing speed, meaning it can perform one quadrillion operations per second. Coatlicue would have a capacity of 314 petaflops.

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