AMD, Dell and Cambridge launch UK sovereign AI lab with Zenith supercomputer
The University of Cambridge, AMD, and Dell Technologies have established the Sovereign AI Innovation Lab (SAIL) alongside Zenith, the UK's largest AI-for-science supercomputer. The announcement came on 11 June at an event attended by Dr Lisa Su, AMD's chair and CEO, and James Frith MP, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.
Zenith runs on 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors and AMD Instinct MI355X GPU accelerators built into Dell infrastructure. The system is funded by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and UK Research and Innovation.
What SAIL will do
SAIL will operate as a collaborative environment where researchers, healthcare organizations, public-sector institutions, and industry partners can develop and deploy AI technologies. The lab sits within Cambridge's Research Computing Service.
The lab will focus on open and interoperable AI infrastructure built on AMD computing platforms and cloud native technologies. Work areas include AI training and inference, scientific foundation models, simulation-assisted AI workflows, and secure public-sector AI services.
Dr Paul Calleja, Director of the Cambridge Research Computing Service, said the launch represents "a major national moment in the UK's build-out of AI for science, sovereign AI capability and public-private technology partnership."
Early research applications
Cambridge Cancer Centre is using Zenith's compute power for cancer research linked to the planned Cambridge Cancer Research Hospital, due to open in 2029. The hospital will develop AI-assisted clinical decision support to inform treatment decisions in real time at the point of care.
Dr Joe Zhang, Chief Technology Officer for OneLondon and the AI Centre for Value-Based Healthcare, discussed MOSAIC, the Multimodal Oncology Sovereign AI Collaboration. The project will use NHS trust data and Zenith to build cancer foundation models for diagnosis, treatment selection, outcomes prediction, and therapeutics development.
Environmental forecasting is also underway. Dr Scott Hosking, Mission Director for Environmental Forecasting at The Alan Turing Institute, said Zenith is improving IceNet, a pan-Arctic sea ice forecasting system, through work with the British Antarctic Survey and The Arctic University of Norway.
Sunrise for fusion research
A second supercomputer, Sunrise, is being built for fusion energy research through a partnership between Cambridge and the UK Atomic Energy Authority. It uses the same AMD and Dell architecture as Zenith.
Researchers will use Sunrise to model fusion plasmas, develop materials for fusion power plant conditions, and test designs before construction. The system is funded by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero and will support the Culham Campus, home to the UK's first AI Growth Zone.
Professor Deborah Prentice, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, said: "Zenith, alongside Sunrise and SAIL, transforms what the University of Cambridge can achieve. By bringing together world leading researchers with national scale AI computing power, Cambridge is now equipped to tackle some of the most complex challenges of our time, from cancer, to climate, to clean energy."
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