BRUSSELS, Jan. 11 (Xinhua) -- The European Commission on Thursday announced a plan to invest 1 billion euros (1.19 billion U.S. dollars) with European Union (EU) member states to build a world-class European supercomputers infrastructure.

Under the new initiative, called EuroHPC Joint Undertaking which is crucial for the EU's competitiveness and independence in the data economy, totally around 1 billion euros of public funding would be invested by 2020 to acquire, build and deploy across Europe a world-class High-Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure.

Look in more detail, the bloc's contribution in EuroHPC will be around 486 million euros under the current Multiannual Financial Framework, matched by a similar amount from member states and associated countries, according to the Commission's statement.

The activities of the initiative includes acquisition and operation of two world-class pre-exascale supercomputing machines and at least two mid-range supercomputing machines, and a research and innovation programme on HPC to support the development of European supercomputing technology, said the statement.

The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking will operate in 2019 to 2026.

Earlier, Seven member states signed the EuroHPC declaration in March 2017 and were later joined by more member states. They agreed to build a pan-European integrated exascale supercomputing infrastructure and welcomed other member states and associated countries to sign the declaration. (1 euro = 1.19 U.S. dollars)