UK-EU AI collaboration to connect Britain with continents HPC’s

Building on the UK’s new deal with the EU, the government has announced plans to improve AI collaboration with Europe, which will see UK organisations invited to step forward to become Britain’s link to the continent’s top supercomputers.

From today, public research organisations can apply to host the UK’s AI Factory Antenna – a facility that, if approved, would link British research expertise to advanced supercomputers across Europe. The opportunity is open to individual public research organisations or consortia with up to €5m funding available. The UK’s AI Factory Antenna site will combine EuroHPC compute with access to data, training and software support, enabling UK scientists, startups and public institutions to build larger, more complex AI models and shortening development cycles.

The programme builds on the UK’s governments earlier investments in building compute infrastructure, with £44bn invested in data centres since July last year (See - £6.3bn investment in UK data centres to power AI innovation). This summer, the government will also confirm the next sites for AI Growth Zones - specialist clusters designed to host AI infrastructure. These actions will be underpinned by the Compute Strategy, a ten-year roadmap to increase national compute capacity twenty-fold, due later this year.

This latest collaboration was a recommendation in the UK’s AI Opportunities Action Plan (See - PM outlines AI Opportunities Action Plan), and builds on the existing relationship with the EuroHPC JU initiative (which the UK joined in in May 2024), giving UK researchers free access to EuroHPC’s supercomputers via the UK’s association to Horizon Europe. The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) is an EU-led initiative that pools resources from the EU and participating countries to develop European computing infrastructure and research capabilities.

Posted by: Simon Baxter at 08:45