HPC & AI in Argentina

In this session on HPC and AI in Argentina, chaired by Carla Osthoff of Brazil's National Laboratory of Scientific Computing, Nicolas Wolovick of the National University of Cordoba and the SCALAC Latin American HPC community surveys the state of Argentine supercomputing. Argentina has placed a system in the Top500 for the first time, Clementina 21, funded through the Equipar Ciencia program; the remaining funds were spread across many very small systems nationwide, each under roughly 200 CPU teraflops, with actual spending eroded by delays, devaluation, and inflation. Centers excluded from the program have resorted to importing decommissioned hardware, including tons of equipment from Switzerland and Texas. Wolovick describes a paradoxical AI climate: talk of a $25 billion OpenAI investment in Patagonia and proposals to legalize non-human corporations coexist with universities unable to afford a single modern GPU with FP8 support, a divide covered by the New York Times. A Development Bank AI funding program approved in 2023 had executed only 0.6 percent of its budget by mid-2025. He presents SCALAC's HPC observatory, which surveys non-Top500 systems across Latin America and the Caribbean with basic uptime and staffing questions, since low utilization often reflects understaffing. He closes by inviting attendees to the Latin American HPC conference to be hosted in Cordoba, and in the Q&A argues the core constraint is a state that does not see HPC as part of the future.