UK invests 'hugely' in AI, launches 5 new quantum projects

He is determined to develop the new national supercomputer Isambard AI.

The British government has decided to invest an additional £500 million ($626 million) to support artificial intelligence (AI) research, Prime Minister Jeremy Hunt announced in a speech to Parliament.

The funding is part of the National Quantum Strategy, which has been allocated £2.5 billion ($3.1 billion). One of the main goals is to build large-scale quantum computers.

As part of the initiative, the Isambard AI supercomputer is expected to be installed at the University of Bristol in the summer of 2024.

The supercomputer is named after British engineering pioneer Isambard Kingdom Brunel and is expected to be 10 times faster than the UK's current fastest supercomputer, ARCHER2.

The British government is investing £225 million ($273 million) in the computer.

The system will include thousands of graphics processing units (GPUs) designed to develop large language models. Isambard-AI uses 5,448 Nvidia GH200 Grace Hopper superchips.

The Nvidia GH200 combines a 72-core Arm Grace processor and a Hopper GPU over an NVLink-C2C connection with 900 GB/s bandwidth.

The project is led by University of Bristol experts Professor Simon Mackintosh-Smith and Dr Sadaf Alam, along with a team of high performance computing experts from universities in Bath, Bristol, Cardiff and Exeter.

The additional £500 million will take the total UK Government investment in the sector to more than £1.5 billion.

In addition, the UK has launched five new research projects under the National Quantum Strategy, each focusing on developing different quantum technologies.

These include building quantum computers capable of performing trillions of calculations and developing networks to communicate between quantum processors in different data centers.

Research projects are also underway in the field of quantum sensors to collect data for use in the aviation and navigation industries.

(according to hightech)

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