UK's Isambard-AI super powers up as government goes AI crazy
- Reference: 1749485710
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/06/09/uks_isambardai_super_powers_up/
- Source link:
Announced [1]about 18 months ago , Isambard-AI has been touted as a huge leap forward for AI compute power in the UK.
Based on the HPE [2]Cray EX4000 system, it incorporates over 5,000 of Nvidia's Grace-Hopper GPUs, and is expected to deliver over 21 exaFLOPS of 8-bit floating point performance for LLM training, and more than 250 petaFLOP/s of 64-bit performance.
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Construction started on the site to house the new system last June, at the National Composites Centre (NCC) in the Bristol and Bath Science Park, but this June the team in charge is starting to power everything up and preparing to welcome the first early access users.
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"We're going through bring-up now, which takes a few months to shake down big systems like this," said Professor Simon McIntosh-Smith, director of the Bristol Center for Supercomputing (BriCS) at the University of Bristol.
"If it all goes well, we're hoping to get our first early access users on by the end of July, and to open more fully later in the summer," he told The Register .
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The new super cost £225 million (about $300 million) to build, as part of a larger £300 million (about $400 million) package from the UK government to establish a national Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (AIRR).
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Keir Starmer gave the opening address of [7]London Tech Week , and also shared a stage with Nvidia's [8]rockstar CEO Jensen Huang to big up all things AI, including Isambard-AI.
"We're going to bring about great change in so many aspects of our lives," the UK PM said, adding that "I've seen for myself the incredible contribution that tech and AI can make."
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And it looks like government is going to be getting the AI treatment, as Starmer said he has "set the challenge to all of my teams: show me how they can use AI - not just in the output of government, not just in partnership with yourselves and others in the delivery of services - but also in the very way we do government. How can we transform what we do?"
Starmer conceded that not everyone shares his enthusiasm. "Some people out there are sceptical. They worry about AI taking their jobs," he said. "But I know from audiences like this, this debate has been had many times. We need to push past it."
He also announced an extra £1 billion (about $1.3 billion) in AI research funding to "scale up our compute power by a factor of 20," adding: "You know how important that is - a huge increase in the size of Britain's AI engine. It means we can be an AI maker, not just an AI taker."
On top of this, there is to be an £185 million (about £250 million) investment in training with the aim of making up to a million young people trained in tech skills.
Additionally, Starmer touched on the contentious issue of planning reforms, one of the aims of which is to make it easier for developers to [10]dodge any local objections to building plans for AI datacenters.
"We are going to build more labs, more datacenters - and we're going to do it much, much more quickly," he said. "Our Planning and Infrastructure Bill going through Parliament right now is a real game-changer. Each of you in this room knows how important it is to change our rules on planning, infrastructure, and the regulatory environment – and how that can drive growth in building homes – what a difference that could make."
[11]UK's Arm-based Isambard 2 supercomputer powers off for good
[12]AMD claims Nvidia's Grace CPU Superchip, Arm are no match for its Epyc Zen 4 cores
[13]Microsoft puts ex-DeepMind boffin in charge of London AI hub
[14]Cerebras CEO puts Nvidia on blast for 'arming' China with top-tier GPUs
Huang expressed his approval of the British government's plans – as well he might: AI spending almost always translates into more Nvidia GPU sales.
Nvidia will continue to invest in Britain, Huang promised. "We're going to start our AI lab here… we're going to partner with the UK to upskill the ecosystem of developers into the world of AI."
"I make this prediction – because of AI, every industry in the UK will be a tech industry," he stated, adding: "The UK has one of the richest AI communities of anywhere on the planet, the deepest thinkers, the best universities… and the third largest AI capital investment of anywhere in the world." ®
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[1] https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/01/uk_isambard_supercomputer/
[2] https://www.hpe.com/us/en/compute/hpc/supercomputing/cray-exascale-supercomputer.html
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_specialfeatures/europeansupercomputing&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aEdZaxBCeO-dBT7NU2hE1gAAARM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_specialfeatures/europeansupercomputing&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aEdZaxBCeO-dBT7NU2hE1gAAARM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_specialfeatures/europeansupercomputing&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aEdZaxBCeO-dBT7NU2hE1gAAARM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_specialfeatures/europeansupercomputing&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aEdZaxBCeO-dBT7NU2hE1gAAARM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://londontechweek.com/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/08/big_bucks_huang_gets_fiscal_payday/
[9] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_specialfeatures/europeansupercomputing&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aEdZaxBCeO-dBT7NU2hE1gAAARM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/17/objections_to_datacenter_builds_cni/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/02/isambard_2_retired/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/23/amd_nvidia_arm_benchmarks/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/08/microsoft_london_ai/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/16/cerebras_ceo_blasts_nvidia/
[15] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: "They worry about AI taking their jobs"
Hope they have the funding in place to cover the cost of running this
With Reform nipping at their ankles, any bandwagon will do.
An entirely new sector for the British government to fail in, having failed in all the others.
Caveat. I am not a Reform supporter. I despise them. Simply stating a fact. After over a decade of even worse governmental failure than is usual in the UK, you can be as bad as Reform and still stand a chance of getting elected if the voters are racist enough, xenophobic enough, gullible enough and managed to avoid learning anything at school.
Re: With Reform nipping at their ankles, any bandwagon will do.
Agreed, but this doesn't buy votes back from Reform, perhaps more effective for soft support in lobbying and funding
Re: With Reform nipping at their ankles, any bandwagon will do.
It's really worrying that they're managing to dictate the political landscape despite having a tiny nber of MPs, councillors etc. they have a huge media presence and even bigger mouths.
They named it after The Reckless Engineer. Very droll.
I would rather that it was named after an engineer than a politician.
In other news today
[1]Advanced AI suffers ‘complete accuracy collapse’ in face of complex problems, study finds
‘Pretty devastating’ Apple paper raises doubts about race to reach stage of AI at which it matches human intelligence
So we have just enough AI to take jobs away from working in creative industries and call centres but not enough AI to solve any of the great problems the human race obviously needs help with (energy, climate, food...).
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jun/09/apple-artificial-intelligence-ai-study-collapse
Re: In other news today
Came here to post that very link. Well done.
Disappointing to not see the Reg angle on that paper yet
Also curious as to why Apple would publish such a damning report, I thought they were about to leap headfirst into this AI nonsense
Re: In other news today
An interesting paper indeed, by the same [1]Apple team who previously evaluated LLMs' abilities at [2]grade-school mathematical reasoning using their own independent benchmarks (GSM-Symbolic), identifying similar limitations to the A I software.
Here, Figure 4, shows Towers of Hanoi collapsing at 4 or 5 disks without CoT in Claude Sonnet 3.7 and DeepSeek V3, and at 8 disks with the "reasoning" version of the models. Checkers jumping collapses at 2 vs 3 checkers, blocks world collapses beyond 2 blocks for either type of model, and river crossing with 2 people (not more) is ok with CoT but fails without it. Fig. 6 shows o3-mini is better at checkers jumping and blocks world by a bit but all tested LLMs fail " beyond certain complexity threshold " that is rather low (imho).
Makes me wonder how much [3]Graph of Thought (GoT) might help in this, if at all ...
[edited to add]: The El Reg Expert take on this study is [4]now up (the real McCoy!)!
[1] https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/illusion-of-thinking
[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.05229
[3] https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.09687
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/09/apple_ai_boffins_puncture_agi_hype/
Re: In other news today
"LRMs face a complete accuracy collapse beyond certain complexities"
That happens to me too....
Re: In other news today
If it does become as intelligent as humans (and in its current form that's unlikely), there's going to be an awkward discussion on ethics. It's one thing to make a dumb tool work for you, but something with sentience and intelligence?
With any luck, just in time for the bubble to burst.
5000 GPUs for £225m
If these Nvidia GPU's come on Nvidia's own 8 x GPU sled, like all the other vendors have, that comes to 625 servers. So with that assumption, each server costs ~£360k, hoollleeee shhheeeet. I saw something early this year stating that grace hopper single gpu machines were costing ~$41k and up so I would say HPE are making a nice profit here.
"They worry about AI taking their jobs"
No, I worry that you're betting big on a totally unproven, extremely expensive and power hungry technology that's unlikely to create more than a handful of jobs*.
* And they'll mostly be estate agents trying to sell unused data centres that were built only the foundations of hopeless and uninformed optimism.