[brnt]

The alternative is having to pay for HPC (Azure offers this) and not developing any competences around the planning, operation and maintenance of such an operation.

Europe has tons of supercomputers, this is just the latest crossing a particular size that sounds cool in outreach and promotion. The research done on these machines (particle physics is a major consumer, see CERN) means there is a very healthy and large community around such tooling, and work is being done to onboard new fields as well. This is a meaningful outcome of such computers, even if they don't contain local free range chips ;)