UK pledges £900 million towards exascale supercomputer
Will boost country's AI competitiveness versus US and China
The UK government has allocated £900 million towards the creation of a new supercomputer, in an effort to bolster the competitiveness of UK developers in the global market.
The chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, revealed the news in the Budget on Wednesday, announcing funds for constructing an exascale supercomputer - several times more powerful than the largest computers in the UK - and creating a new AI research resource.
The initial funds will be made available this year.
"Because AI needs computing horsepower, I today commit around £900 million of funding to implement the recommendations in the independent Future Of Compute Review for an exascale supercomputer," Hunt told MPs.
Exascale computing is a new milestone, meaning a computer can perform over one quintillion (one billion, billion) simple calculations per second, also known as an exaflops.
The development is particularly helpful for researchers who need significant computing power to train intricate AI models, create medications, address climate change issues and perform other similar tasks.
Only one exascale machine, known as Frontier, is currently known to exist (others may be in use for military operations but not publicly acknowledged). Frontier is housed at America's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and primarily utilised for scientific research.
In addition to the exascale investment, the government shared its intention to invest £2.5 billion in quantum technologies over the next 10 years.
"The power that AI's complex algorithms need can also be provided by quantum computing," Hunt said.
"So today we publish a quantum strategy which will set our vision to be a world-leading quantum-enabled economy by 2033 with a research and innovation programme totalling £2.5 billion."
The allocated funding will encompass not only engineering and research investments, but also financial support for businesses investing in quantum technologies, pilot projects, and the initial phases of developing regulations for quantum technology.
BritGPT
The government has acknowledged the recent advancements in large language models (LLMs), the technology that powers chatbots like ChatGPT and Google's Bard, though the latter is not yet publicly available.
In that vein, the government has said it intends to form a task force dedicated to developing UK sovereign capabilities in foundation models, including LLMs.
Last month Adrian Joseph, BT's chief data and artificial intelligence officer, told the House of Commons' Science and Technology Committee that the UK must invest in LLMs, or risk falling behind other nations and even major tech firms.
"It is a massive arms race that has been around for some time, but the heat has certainly been turned up most recently," he added.