University of Bristol secures £225m from the UK government to build the Isambard-AI supercomputer

The University of Bristol has secured £225m in government funding to build Isambard-AI, a powerful new national supercomputer. The investment forms part of a wider £300m initiative to establish the Artificial Intelligence Research Resource. Hewlett Packard Enterprise has been selected to supply the next-generation infrastructure, which will house thousands of NVIDIA superchips at the National Composites Centre.

The installation aims to multiply the UK's current top supercomputing capacity tenfold upon its launch next summer. Researchers across fields such as climate science, robotics, and drug discovery will gain access to the system, while the government's Frontier AI Taskforce will use priority access to evaluate advanced model safety and mitigate national security risks.