Coatlicue, the Mexican supercomputer, will have the capacity to perform 314 billion operations per second, which will make it the most powerful in Latin America.
Yesterday morning, President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo presented this technological development, whose construction will start in January 2026 and will be completed in two years. Public investment will amount to 6 billion pesos.
The supercomputer – which takes its name from Mexica mythology: Coatlicue, mother of the gods – will allow processing millions of data that will contribute to improving public policies, a fundamental step to consolidate sovereignty.
It will offer solutions to public problems such as weather and natural disaster predictions, crop planning to improve harvests and food management, soil and subsoil image processing for oil and gas exploration and production, energy consumption planning to save electricity, and the processing of large volumes of customs and invoice data to prevent acts of corruption and tax evasion, to name a few.
“We are very excited, the Coatlicue supercomputer, which will begin construction next year, we are defining the location; it will allow Mexico to fully enter into the use of artificial intelligence and data processing, which today we do not have the capacity to do because we do not have sufficient computing capacity. It will help us a lot, not only to the development of science, technologies, but in essence, to the development of the country,” said the president.
Innovation and development
He highlighted that this is a public innovation and technological development project. “We want it to be a public supercomputer; it is the supercomputer of the people of Mexico.”
With this announcement, the project of leading the country to the forefront in supercomputing is complemented. The first step was the signing of a collaboration agreement with the Barcelona Supercomputing Center last week, through which Mexican scientists will be able to access its facilities to process information, while the construction of Coatlicue concludes.
When speaking, the head of the Digital Transformation and Telecommunications Agency, José Antonio Peña Merino, explained that with this advance it will be possible to solve problems that require high computing capacity, carry out cutting-edge scientific research in strategic sectors, offer computing capacity to support entrepreneurial projects and provide massive computing services to private initiatives, and thus generate a financially self-sustaining model.
He added that it will allow faster progress on health, climate, energy and mobility issues, in addition to promoting the country’s technological development, economic prosperity and national scientific research.
The Coatlicue supercomputer will have a processing of 14,480 graphics processing units (GPU), with a capacity to perform 314 billion operations per second, which represents seven times more than the current largest supercomputer in the region, which is privately owned and located in Brazil.
“The most powerful supercomputer in the region will be public, it is important, and a management model that also involves collaboration between government and educational institutions,” he stated.
For her part, the Secretary of Science, Humanities, Technology and Innovation, Rosaura Ruiz Gutiérrez, explained that Coatlicue will be linked to the national supercomputer cluster made up of universities and research centers.
“It is a great step not only for science in Mexico. Scientific production worldwide is millions of articles and data that are already humanly impossible to process. In health, the environment, prediction of possible natural disasters, a single person or a team (they cannot interpret).
“The level of data that we have in the world is that magnitude, that is why we need it now, so that Mexican science and industry, the government itself and its operation reach much more modern stages using the technologies that have been created on the planet and that we have to benefit from them,” he noted.