Professor Simon McIntosh-Smith

We're now inside the Isambard AI supercomputer compound.

You'll probably notice around you there's lots of physical security.

You have lots of big fences, lots of barbed wire, loads of cameras.

That's because what we're about to go in and see is one of the most powerful supercomputers anywhere in the world.

Well, Isambard AI is the first big part of the UK government's AI research resource program funded by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, DSIT.

And it's providing a national resource for researchers and companies to be able to run their AI workloads at scale in the UK for the first time.

The first thing you'll see is it's in what looks like a big metal box.

And this is the purpose-built data center.

It's actually a modular data center, which is a special kind of data center that's actually prefabricated off-site.

And then it's brought here in different components and reassembled.

We actually reassembled this whole data center in just 48 hours.

So this is part of the UK government's national AI strategy?

That's right.

It's all funded by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, or DSIT.

And they're investing hundreds of millions of pounds to ensure that the UK has access to the AI infrastructure, the AI capability that we need as a nation.

Well, one of the things the government was really pressed to enable was the ability to train large language models in the UK and have a sovereign AI capability.

So the compute would be here, the data would be here, the software would be here.

And you needed a big enough supercomputer optimized for AI to do that.

And so Isambard AI has actually got nearly 5,500 of the recent NVIDIA GPUs to enable that training of the largest large language models.

So when the government realized this was gonna be very important, they asked us, how quickly could you do it?