UK's Isambard-AI Super Powers Up As Government Goes AI Crazy

Britain's beefiest supercomputer, Isambard-AI, is set to become fully operational this summer, as the government steps up its strategy to push AI everywhere as a driver for economic recovery.

Announced about 18 months ago, Isambard-AI has been touted as a huge leap forward for AI compute power in the UK.

Based on the HPE Cray EX4000 system, it incorporates over 5,000 of Nvidia's Grace-Hopper GPUs, and is expected to deliver over 21 exaFLOPS of 8-bit floating point performance for LLM training, and more than 250 petaFLOP/s of 64-bit performance.

Construction started on the site to house the new system last June, at the National Composites Centre (NCC) in the Bristol and Bath Science Park, but this June the team in charge is starting to power everything up and preparing to welcome the first early access users.

"We're going through bring-up now, which takes a few months to shake down big systems like this," said Professor Simon McIntosh-Smith, director of the Bristol Center for Supercomputing (BriCS) at the University of Bristol.

"If it all goes well, we're hoping to get our first early access users on by the end of July, and to open more fully later in the summer," he told The Register.

The new super cost £225 million (about $300 million) to build, as part of a larger £300 million (about $400 million) package from the UK government to establish a national Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (AIRR).

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Keir Starmer gave the opening address of London Tech Week, and also shared a stage with Nvidia's rockstar CEO Jensen Huang to big up all things AI, including Isambard-AI.

"We're going to bring about great change in so many aspects of our lives," the UK PM said, adding that "I've seen for myself the incredible contribution that tech and AI can make."

And it looks like government is going to be getting the AI treatment, as Starmer said he has "set the challenge to all of my teams: show me how they can use AI - not just in the output of government, not just in partnership with yourselves and others in the delivery of services - but also in the very way we do government. How can we transform what we do?"

Starmer conceded that not everyone shares his enthusiasm. "Some people out there are sceptical. They worry about AI taking their jobs," he said. "But I know from audiences like this, this debate has been had many times. We need to push past it."

He also announced an extra £1 billion (about $1.3 billion) in AI research funding to "scale up our compute power by a factor of 20," adding: "You know how important that is - a huge increase in the size of Britain's AI engine. It means we can be an AI maker, not just an AI taker."

On top of this, there is to be an £185 million (about £250 million) investment in training with the aim of making up to a million young people trained in tech skills.

Additionally, Starmer touched on the contentious issue of planning reforms, one of the aims of which is to make it easier for developers to dodge any local objections to building plans for AI datacenters.

"We are going to build more labs, more datacenters - and we're going to do it much, much more quickly," he said. "Our Planning and Infrastructure Bill going through Parliament right now is a real game-changer. Each of you in this room knows how important it is to change our rules on planning, infrastructure, and the regulatory environment – and how that can drive growth in building homes – what a difference that could make."

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Huang expressed his approval of the British government's plans – as well he might: AI spending almost always translates into more Nvidia GPU sales.

Nvidia will continue to invest in Britain, Huang promised. "We're going to start our AI lab here… we're going to partner with the UK to upskill the ecosystem of developers into the world of AI."

"I make this prediction – because of AI, every industry in the UK will be a tech industry," he stated, adding: "The UK has one of the richest AI communities of anywhere on the planet, the deepest thinkers, the best universities… and the third largest AI capital investment of anywhere in the world." ®