The UK government is allocating $273 million to develop Isambard-AI, its most powerful supercomputer to date, with plans for it to rank among the world’s leading AI supercomputers. This cutting-edge system will be powered by a multitude of Nvidia superchips, enabling it to perform over 200 quadrillion calculations per second. The University of Bristol expects to activate Isambard-AI in the summer of 2024.

Notably, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HP) will collaborate in building this supercomputer, leveraging more than 5000 Nvidia GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips, resulting in over 21 exaflops of AI performance, equivalent to more than 21 quintillion floating-point operations per second, especially for AI tasks like training large language models.

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The University of Bristol asserts that this level of performance will outpace the UK’s current fastest AI supercomputer by a factor of 10. Isambard-AI will be housed in a self-cooled, self-contained data center at Bristol’s National Composites Center. Furthermore, it will have the capability to connect with other supercomputers in the UK, further enhancing its performance. According to Simon McIntosh-Smith of the University of Bristol, this will position the supercomputer as “one of the most powerful AI systems for open science anywhere” once it becomes operational.

The announcement about this supercomputer was made during the UK’s AI Safety Summit, attended by leaders from various countries, including the US. The summit focused on discussing potential AI risks and strategies for addressing them.