German Chancellor Friedrich Merz on Friday launched Jupiter, a supercomputer said to be the fastest in Europe.

The ceremony took place at the Jülich Research Center in western Germany, where the computer is based.

Jupiter took two years to build and can carry out one trillion calculations per second.

Its name is short for Joint Undertaking Pioneer for Innovative and Transformative Exascale Research.

Exascale are systems capable of performing at least one exaFLOP, or a quintillion floating-point operations per second.

Merz hailed the development of the supercomputer, saying it was a "historic European pioneering project."

Jupiter weighs around 3,400 tons.

Jupiter runs on green electricity, making it the most energy-efficient supercomputer in the world, according to the chair of the board at the Jülich Research Center.

Astrid Lambrecht added that the computer would serve as a "central building block for Europe's digital sovereignty".

Developing Jupiter cost 500 million euros ($586 million), with 250 million ($293 million) of that provided by the European Commission.

Germany's federal and state science ministries raised 125 million euros ($146 million) each.

The investment underscores Germany's claim to a leading role in the current technological revolution.

AP Video shot by Daniel Niemann