A powerful new supercomputer will be built in Edinburgh after all, the chancellor has announced.
Up to £750m has been put aside for the project, Rachel Reeves revealed as part of her spending review.
The Conservatives, when in government, had previously pledged £800m for the project but in August, Labour scrapped the plans, claiming it was part of “unfunded commitments”.
“We are investing in Scotland’s renewal, so working people are better off,” said Ms Reeves on Wednesday.
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On Monday, one of the leading figures in AI, the chief executive of NVIDIA, told the prime minister the UK had all the ingredients to be a leader in AI except for the infrastructure.
“You can’t do machine learning without a machine. The ability to build AI supercomputers here in the UK will naturally attract more AI startups” and create a better ecosystem, said Jensen Huang at London Tech Week.
The UK is the third-largest AI market in the world and if the technology is “fully embraced”, it could bring £47bn to the economy every year, according to the government.
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This new computer, built at the University of Edinburgh, will “give scientists from across the UK the compute power they need,” according to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.
It will be the most powerful in the UK and work alongside the AI research resource, which is a developing network of the UK’s most powerful supercomputers.
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This “marks a pivotal step forward for the tech sector,” Carolyn Dawson, the chief executive of Founders Forum Group and Tech Nation, told Sky News.
“The UK’s AI ecosystem is brimming with talent and ambition, but to truly compete on the world stage, we need robust, future-ready infrastructure,” she said.
“This investment in compute power is exactly what’s required to accelerate innovation and secure a leading role for Britain in the global AI race.”
The resource has already been used to test millions of potential drugs virtually and speed up research into Alzheimer’s vaccines and cancer treatments.
“If all the forecasts are right, the demand for compute is going to grow exponentially over the next few years,” Laura Citron, who leads London & Partners and works on bringing international companies to the capital, told Sky News before the announcement.
“That’s why it’s so important that the government is investing very significantly in AI infrastructure, as well as really freeing up the planning regulations so we can get data centres built at speed.”
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AI demands increasingly huge amounts of computational power because the models process vast amounts of data through billions of mathematical calculations.
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In order to complete those calculations quickly and accurately, powerful hardware is required, like this new supercomputer.
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On top of Wednesday’s £750m pledge, the prime minister also announced £1bn funding on Monday to scale up the country’s AI compute power by 20 times.
