The UK’s fastest supercomputer Isambard-AI will play a major role in advancing the nation’s AI capabilities.
On 13 January 2025, the Government has announced that Artificial intelligence will be unleashed across the UK to deliver national renewal.
With a rich history of pioneering advancements in AI spanning decades, Bristol is uniquely placed to help deliver these goals, outlined by tech entrepreneur Matt Clifford in his AI Opportunities Action Plan.
The University, recently crowned ‘AI University of The Year’ at the National AI Awards, received an unprecedented £225m Government investment to create Isambard-AI which has been assembled in record time thanks to its Bristol Centre for Supercomputing (BriCS) team.
Isambard-AI, situated at the National Composites Centre (NCC), is set to become the UK’s fastest and most powerful supercomputer, purpose-built for AI research following completion in Summer 2025. It will offer capacity never seen before in the UK for researchers and industry to harness the huge potential of AI in fields such as robotics, big data, climate research and drug discovery. Critically, Isambard-AI will also enable the UK’s sovereign AI capability for the first time.
Built in a climate-controlled modular data centre being fully installed over the winter of 2024, phase one of Isambard-AI is already up and running. Current AI projects include understanding what role the inflammation of blood vessels plays in heart disease, using camera tracking to determine the health of livestock on farms and producing groundbreaking new vaccines.
Isambard-AI is officially the most sustainable supercomputer in the UK and the second greenest machine in the world as top two in the Green500 list. It has been built in a low-carbon, modular data centre, and there is significant potential to recycle the waste heat output for nearby infrastructure.
From summer 2025, users will also be able to access Isambard-AI phase 2 through the early access call while the system is being tested, which has an additional 5,280 Nvidia Grace Hopper (GH200) superchips.
Researchers and startups are now invited to express interest in accessing Isambard-AI to run large-scale projects.