AMD to invest £2bn in UK to expand AI supercomputing

Advanced Micro Devices will invest £2 billion in the United Kingdom over five years to expand AI computing capacity, partner with Imperial College London and Oriole Networks, and support two University of Cambridge supercomputers. The announcement was made at London Tech Week.

According to AMD, the funding will accelerate AI research, increase access to high-performance computing and back work in healthcare, climate modelling and scientific discovery. The company plans to collaborate with Imperial on computational science projects that require large-scale compute and to optimise AI models, scientific workflows and data-intensive applications for AMD hardware and its ROCm software stack.

AMD will work with Oriole Networks to support the Advanced Research and Invention Agency’s Scaling Inference Lab, a national programme aimed at addressing AI infrastructure bottlenecks and developing a large-scale AI system using a pure photonic network. AMD and Dell Technologies will also partner with the University of Cambridge to expand the national AI infrastructure needed to run the new machines.

The investment includes backing for two Cambridge systems. Zenith is an AI-for-science supercomputer funded by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and UK Research and Innovation. Sunrise is a second system funded by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, owned by the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority and operated by the University of Cambridge.

Together the systems are intended for healthcare research, materials science, engineering simulation, fusion research and the development of scientific AI models. The company will explore optimising workloads on its compute platforms and on ROCm, its open software stack for accelerated computing.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves welcomed the investment, calling it ‘a major vote of confidence in Britain’s place as a global AI superpower’ and saying the programme will boost research, skills development and economic growth.

AMD chief executive Lisa Su described the UK as having the talent and research capacity to lead the next era of AI and pledged the company will work with government, universities and industry to expand compute infrastructure for sovereign AI and scientific discovery.

Technology secretary Liz Kendall linked AMD’s pledge to a new £1.1 billion government plan to strengthen the UK chip industry and attract further AI investment, noting the package aims to build domestic design and manufacturing capability.

AMD’s five-year plan focuses on combining commercial compute technology with national research priorities and on making advanced compute resources more available to researchers across the UK.