UK Commits £300 Million to Fund Two AI Supercomputers
The UK has revealed its commitment to invest £300m, equivalent to $363.57m, in two advanced artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputers, dubbed the ‘AI Research Resource’. The announcement came on November 1 after the conclusion of the Global Summit on Artificial Intelligence Security, where the main goal was to increase the security of advanced artificial intelligence models.
Rishi Sunak, the UK Prime Minister, emphasized the importance of providing their scientific talent with the essential tools to ensure the safety of state-of-the-art AI models as frontier AI models gain momentum. This significant investment is intended to facilitate research aimed at achieving this goal.
The two upcoming supercomputers will significantly expand the AI computing capacity available to UK researchers, more than 30 times the capacity of the country’s current largest public AI resources. The deployment of these supercomputers is expected to be completed in the summer of 2024.
A second supercomputer called “Dawn” will be developed in collaboration with Dell and powered by 1,000 AI chips supplied by Intel. Earlier reports suggested that the UK had already earmarked $130 million to buy AI chips.
According to an official UK statement, “Isambard-AI”, one of the supercomputers, will be able to perform more than 200 petaflops, which is a staggering 200 quadrillion calculations per second. This significant computing capacity underlines the UK’s commitment to advancing AI research, which is becoming increasingly important in an era characterized by rapidly evolving AI technologies. The country’s investment in these supercomputers demonstrates its determination to remain at the forefront of AI development.
