AMD commits £2 billion to U.K. AI infrastructure over five years
AMD will invest up to $2.7 billion (£2 billion) over the next five years in the United Kingdom to expand AI computing resources and support scientific research, the chipmaker announced at London Tech Week.
The investment includes two new AI supercomputers at the University of Cambridge. Zenith, funded by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and U.K. Research and Innovation, will support healthcare research, climate modeling, materials science, and engineering simulation. Sunrise, a second system being built for the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, will focus on fusion energy research.
AMD and Dell Technologies are designing and operating both systems using their hardware and software platforms.
Research partnerships expand across universities
Imperial College London joined the initiative to collaborate on computational science applications, including healthcare and climate research. The focus will include optimizing how AI models and scientific workflows run on AMD hardware and the company's ROCm open software platform.
AMD is also working with Oriole Networks on the U.K.'s Advanced Research and Invention Agency Scaling Inference Lab, which aims to address AI infrastructure bottlenecks. The collaboration combines photonic networking technology with AMD processors to test new approaches for scaling AI inference while reducing energy use and latency.
Government backing for AI strategy
The investment aligns with the U.K.'s AI Opportunities Action Plan and AI Hardware Strategy. U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves called the announcement "a major vote of confidence in Britain's place as a global AI superpower."
AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su said the company is working with government, academic, and industry partners to expand access to computing infrastructure needed for what the company describes as sovereign AI development and economic growth.
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