My Feed

Tue, 22 Jul 2025 16:24:19 GMT

The UK’s new National Compute Roadmap is out - https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/uk-compute-roadmap/uk-compute-roadmap It’s the “how to do keep up in AI” strategy and there’s a lot in it! Clusters, data centres, support, RSE and more

First up, there’s some actual money. Re-announcent of £700m to Edinburgh to build CPU HPC and £1bn to “20x AI resource by 2030”. That’s a lot of GPUs. It’s nothing like enough to train a frontier LLM even today, but it should enable a lot of interesting science

There are MoUs with Anthropic and Cohere, neither of which appear to commit anyone to anything, but are full of warm words. It’s more notable that a UK Government tech strategy does NOT include MS.

Surprisingly (to me at least), the Tier-2 HPC facilities all get a call out and a promise of funding. Some good lobbying has been done! More seriously, the strategy is very good at recognising that you can’t just buy hardware. You need the skills to support it including RSEs

EPCC gets the nod as the first “National Supercomting Centre” (no argument from me) and there’s a promise of more. Where will they be? Well… “Our research institutions, including centres of excellence in Cambridge, Bristol, Edinburgh, London, and beyond”… might be a hint!

It’s centralising. Haldane be dammed. There's sarcasm about “not just filling clusters” and it’s made clear that compute allocation will be done centrally and aligned to government strategy.

Data Centres will be mainly private sector funded, with the government creating “AI Action Zones” where presumably planning will be easier. Small Modular Reactors, batteries etc all get a mention. Very 2025

And finally, where’s the Turing Institute? It’s not mentioned at all. The AI Safety Institute gets a call out in the Anthropic MoU, and there’s a new “Sovereign AI Unit” to sit in DIST but nothing, nadda, zlich about Turing. I would be worried if I worked there

Tue, 22 Jul 2025 16:12:42 GMT

There are MoUs with Anthropic and Cohere, neither of which appear to commit anyone to anything, but are full of warm words. It’s more notable that a UK Government tech strategy does NOT include MS.

t’s centralising. Haldane be dammed. There's sarcasm about “not just filling clusters” and it’s made clear that compute allocation will be done centrally and aligned to government strategy.