UK starts £750m national supercomputer construction

The University of Edinburgh has announced the start of construction on the UK’s next National Supercomputer, hosted at the University and owned by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), following an investment of up to £750 million from the UK Government.

• The new machine is expected to use thousands of processors and deliver at least a billion-billion calculations per second, around 50 times more powerful than ARCHER2.
• The system will support research in aircraft engineering, extreme weather, drug discovery for cancer, and other scientific applications; it will use renewable electricity, dry air cooling, and planned heat reuse for University buildings and possibly local homes.
• The article frames the start of construction as a milestone and a step toward strengthening the UK’s sovereign computing power for AI and science.