Mexico will construct Latin America's most powerful supercomputer in a $327mn bet to close the country's artificial intelligence gap and boost its technological competitiveness, government officials announced on November 26, AFP and Associated Press reported. 

The supercomputer, named Coatlicue after an Aztec goddess, will have a processing capacity of 314 petaflops - seven times more powerful than Brazil's Pegaso, currently the region's leader with 42 petaflops, said José Merino, head of Mexico's Telecommunications and Digital Transformation Agency.

Construction will begin in January and take two years to complete, Merino told reporters, though the government has not yet selected a site for the facility.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, a climate scientist by training, said the project would transform Mexico's ability to harness AI and process massive datasets.

"We're very excited. 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," she said during her daily morning press conference.

The supercomputer will be used for climate forecasting, agricultural planning, and water, oil and energy projects, as well as scientific research and supporting private sector innovation, Merino said.

Mexico's most powerful existing supercomputer operates at just 2.3 petaflops. A petaflop measures computing speed and represents one quadrillion operations per second.

Nations worldwide are racing to build ever-faster supercomputers to power increasingly demanding AI systems. The US leads the field, though Europe and Japan also have machines ranked in the global top 10, according to industry rankings.

While revolutionary for the region, Mexico's planned system would still trail far behind the world's most powerful computers. El Capitan, operated by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US, has a processing capacity of 1.809 exaflops - or quintillions of calculations per second. Europe's Jupiter supercomputer, housed in western Germany, performs at similar levels, equivalent to roughly 1mn smartphones combined.

The Mexican government has pitched the project as a democratic computing infrastructure. "We want it to be a public supercomputer, a supercomputer for the people," Sheinbaum said.