Mexico announced plans to construct Latin America’s most powerful supercomputer, a government-backed machine named Coatlicue that officials say will reach 314 petaflops and dramatically boost the country’s ability to harness artificial intelligence.
A petaflop represents one quadrillion (10¹⁵) calculations per second. By comparison, Mexico’s fastest existing system runs at 2.3 petaflops.
The project, expected to cost 6 billion pesos ($326.6 million) and take two years, will begin construction in January, according to José Merino, director of Mexico’s Telecommunications and Digital Transformation Agency.
Coatlicue would outperform the region’s current leader, Brazil’s privately owned Pegaso, which operates at 42 petaflops.
“We want it to be a public supercomputer, a supercomputer for the people,” President Claudia Sheinbaum told reporters during her daily briefing, TRT World reported.
Sheinbaum, a physicist and climate scientist, said a site has not yet been chosen but described the initiative as key to processing large data sets that Mexico currently cannot handle.
“We’re very excited,” she said, per AP. “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 the machine will primarily address public challenges requiring massive computing power, including climate forecasting, agricultural planning, and water, energy, and oil projects, while also supporting scientific research and startup ventures.
Named after the Aztec earth-mother goddess, Coatlicue will still fall far short of the world’s top exascale systems.
The United States’ El Capitan, operated by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, achieves 1.809 exaflops — or quintillions (10¹⁸) of calculations per second — while Europe’s newly unveiled Jupiter in Germany also crosses the exascale threshold.
Nations worldwide are racing to develop ever-faster supercomputers to pair with advancing AI technologies, with the U.S., Europe, and Japan dominating the global top 10 rankings.