Mexico Reveals 314-Petaflop Supercomputer Named After Aztec Goddess

Harriet Pemberton • April 30, 2026 12:24

A worldwide race is accelerating to create ever quicker supercomputers that can work alongside AI systems.

The United States currently sits at the top of the rankings, while Europe and Japan also have machines in the top 10, according to an industry league table for high-performance computing.

Against that backdrop, Mexican officials said on Wednesday that the Mexican government will build a new supercomputer with a processing capacity seven times greater than the computer currently considered the most powerful in Latin America.

Coatlicue supercomputer: Mexico’s 314 petaflops project

The system will be called Coatlicue, after a goddess in Aztec mythology associated with the source of power and life, and it is designed to reach a processing capacity of 314 petaflops.

"We want it to be a public supercomputer, a supercomputer for the people," President Claudia Sheinbaum told reporters.

A petaflop corresponds to 1,000 trillion calculations per second, written as 10 to the power of 15.

At present, Pegaso, a privately owned Brazilian machine, is rated as the most powerful computer in Latin America, with 42 petaflops.

Build schedule, cost and planned uses

Construction of Coatlicue is due to start in January and run for 24 months, with a total budget of six billion pesos ($326.6 million), said Jose Merino, director of Mexico’s Digital Transformation Agency.

Merino said the supercomputer’s primary role will be tackling public-interest problems that demand significant computing power, including climate prediction, planning for crop planting and harvesting, and projects linked to water, oil and energy.

He added that it will also be used for scientific research and to support entrepreneurial projects, among other aims.

How Coatlicue compares with exascale computers

Even so, Mexico’s machine will not rival the world’s most powerful systems, known as exascale computers, which are led by El Capitan.

Run by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the United States, El Capitan delivers a processing capacity of 1.809 exaflops, meaning quintillions (10 to the power of 18) of calculations per second.

Europe has also recently introduced a competitor, Jupiter, located in western Germany, which can likewise perform at least one quintillion calculations per second-roughly the equivalent of about a million smartphones.