UK government plans new investment in supercomputing despite support cut

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The British government has faced a backlash after it halted $1.3 billion in funding for technology projects, but has since vowed to continue funding pioneering artificial intelligence and supercomputing.

Sir Keir Starmer's new Labour government is struggling to contain the fallout from its decision earlier this month to withdraw funding for a project that had promised $800 million to develop a supercomputer at the University of Edinburgh.

Supercomputing is a field where experts warn the UK is lagging behind its international competitors, and ministers say the previous Conservative government failed to adequately fund investment.

The debate over funding is an early test for Labour as it tries to balance its pledge to promote science and technology to achieve ambitious economic growth targets with strict constraints on public spending.

Supercomputing remains a government priority. [tech secretary] Peter Kyle said a government official clearly wants us to do it right. We want the government funding to hit the mark. We're not going to give up on supercomputing at all.

Exascale supercomputing is the ability to produce billions of operations per second, called an exaflop. It is considered the holy grail of computing and is seen as essential for the widespread adoption of AI.

There are two fully operational exascale computers in the world, both in the U.S. Experts believe there is at least one in China, but China has not submitted itself to the global leaderboard for computing capacity. Large economies from Japan to Europe to Saudi Arabia are investing billions of dollars in similar projects.

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Kyle told the Financial Times that he is preparing a bold approach based on an AI action plan currently being developed by entrepreneur and AI expert Matt Clifford, which is expected to be released in September.

He said the plan would outline future computing needs and how to meet them.

Clifford said last year, before taking up government duties, that Britain did not have large-scale sovereign computing resources and that it needed to spend billions of dollars over the next decade to ensure the most important AI companies were based in Britain.

The UK has already invested $225 million in Isambard-AI, an AI-focused supercomputer under development at the University of Bristol, which is set to become one of the most powerful exascale computers in Europe. Two other supercomputers, Archer2 at the University of Edinburgh and DiRAC, built across multiple universities, are due to reach the end of their lifespans within two years.

Two government sources told the FT that Starmer's ambitions for the UK's supercomputing potential were not dampened at all, but there were some concerns about existing budget allocations.

A senior government official said the Edinburgh Exascale project made little strategic sense because it was not focused on AI but rather more traditional computing projects such as scientific simulations. He added that he expected the new government to match previous spending commitments on supercomputing in the upcoming autumn budget.

But shadow science secretary Andrew Griffiths told the FT that the Starmer government had falsely stated that the project would not be funded, despite the investment always being included in the autumn 2024 budget. He called it a huge setback for UK tech… and a sign of diminished ambition for the UK's plans to become a science and technology powerhouse.

Several supercomputing experts interviewed by the FT agreed that investing almost exclusively in a single type of supercomputing hardware was not a strategic decision, and that the new government should instead focus resources on a range of supercomputing hardware, software and technologies that meet the UK’s AI and scientific needs.

Mark Wilkinson, director of the DiRAC facility and a theoretical astrophysicist at the University of Leicester, said that given that the UK lags far behind similar countries in terms of computing capacity, it would be wise to pause and think about how best to invest its limited resources.

He warned that the government should not split the funding into several pieces so that everyone gets a small portion, but instead focus on the best projects. He said the UK was not focused on exaflops, adding that the number of flops was only one measure of performance and that ultimately it was productivity that mattered.

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Sir Peter Matheson, chancellor of the University of Edinburgh, who has spent $31 million of his own money to build an exascale supercomputer and has so far avoided public criticism of the government’s decision, said he welcomed Kyle’s meeting and continued dialogue on this important issue.

However, many have strongly criticised the way the Starmer government communicated its decision to withdraw funding without promising replacement funding.

Ben Johnson, a former policy adviser to the Conservative tech minister, said unclear communication could cause confusion in the research community.

He added that the market is currently very hot and getting hotter by the week. Any delay in procurement could potentially be very costly.

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