AMD $AMD plans to invest up to $2.7 billion (£2 billion) over the next five years in the United Kingdom to expand AI infrastructure, support scientific research, and develop technical talent, the company said.
The chipmaker's five-year pledge includes new AI supercomputers at Cambridge and partnerships with Imperial College London
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AMD $AMD plans to invest up to $2.7 billion (£2 billion) over the next five years in the United Kingdom to expand AI infrastructure, support scientific research, and develop technical talent, the company said.
At London Tech Week on Sunday, Dr. Lisa Su took the stage to detail a range of new collaborations spanning universities, government agencies, and technology firms, all aimed at expanding the availability of computing resources throughout the U.K. According to AMD, the effort is structured to support the U.K.'s AI Opportunities Action Plan and AI Hardware Strategy.
AMD and Dell $DELL Technologies are supporting two AI supercomputers at the University of Cambridge. Zenith, a new AI-for-science platform funded by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and U.K. Research and Innovation, is designed and operated by the university using AMD and Dell technology. A second system, Sunrise, is being built now for the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority and operated by Cambridge, funded by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero; it is dedicated to fusion energy research. The two systems are intended to support applications including healthcare research, climate modeling, materials science, and engineering simulation, the company said.
Imperial College London is also joining the initiative, with the two organizations agreeing to work together on computational science applications, among them research into healthcare and climate. Areas of focus will include finding ways to run AI models and scientific workflows more efficiently on AMD hardware and the company's ROCm open software platform.
Additionally, AMD is collaborating with Oriole Networks in support of the U.K.'s Advanced Research and Invention Agency Scaling Inference Lab, a national initiative aimed at addressing AI infrastructure bottlenecks. The effort combines Oriole's photonic networking technology with AMD processors to evaluate new approaches for scaling AI inference workloads while reducing energy use and latency. The initiative is expected to support what could be the first large-scale AI system powered by a pure photonic network, AMD said.
"The United Kingdom has the talent, research excellence and ambition to help lead the next era of AI," Dr. Lisa Su said in a statement. "AMD is proud to deepen our commitment to the U.K. and work with partners across government, academia and industry to expand access to the compute infrastructure needed to advance sovereign AI, accelerate discovery and drive long-term economic growth."
U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves welcomed the announcement. "This investment is a major vote of confidence in Britain's place as a global AI superpower," Reeves said in a statement. "It will drive more cutting-edge research here in the U.K., open up opportunities for people to build the skills they need for the jobs of the future, and speed up breakthroughs that can improve people's lives and grow our economy."
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