Fight to provide more power for Rishi Sunak's supercomputing lab

Rishi Sunak is believed to have taken a personal interest in the effort to provide additional network capacity. Credit: Ewan Duff/PA Wire

Officers are scrambling to secure additional power capacity for the likely home of Britain's new independent artificial intelligence (AI) lab amid fears that a congested grid could undermine Rishi Sunak's ambitions for the technology.< /p>

The Prime Minister is believed to have taken a personal interest in efforts to provide additional networking capacity to the Bristol supercomputing lab, which is a prime contender for the £100m taxpayer-funded AI Research Resource.

comes amid concerns that power shortages and long delays in accessing additional capacity from the grid could undermine Mr. Sunak's ambition to turn the UK into an international hub for artificial intelligence.

The PM will host a global technology summit in November and hopes that The UK will play a key role in setting standards and global rules and standards for AI.

Building a system powerful enough to run and evaluate. AI systems will prove critical in this effort.

However, there are concerns that the leading contender for AI research resource will be limited by available power from the grid.

The Isambard 3 site of Bristol is expected to University, one of the few «tier 2» supercomputing sites in the UK, is a leader in hosting the project.

Currently, the facility has a power supply with a capacity of 5 megawatts. This capacity is likely to exceed the roughly 5,000 high-performance chips known as graphics processors, which are used in artificial intelligence systems.

1904 Chip production in the West is declining

However, today's flagship models already run on many more processors. Chinese tech giants have reportedly placed orders for around 100,000 chips, and the latest version of ChatGPT is estimated to be trained on 25,000 chips.

The facility's power supply could be doubled next year from its current 5 megawatts to 10 megawatts, equivalent to powering about 20,000 homes, although it is possible that further upgrades will be required to fully meet the site's ambitions.

The prime minister is believed to have been personally involved in the project, attempting to carry out the upgrades.

There are concerns that long delays in connecting to the grid could hamper these efforts. Representatives of various projects, from residential construction to farms with solar panels, complained that it sometimes takes years to connect to the grid.

Virtus, the data center operator, told energy regulator Ofgem in June that supply shortages were holding back investment and jeopardizing Britain's AI ambitions. Ofgem said the number of connection delays means «urgent» reform is needed.

A final decision on the location of the AI ​​Research Resource, which could be operational by next summer, is pending. this month.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), the Silicon Valley IT giant, is working with the University of Bristol on its bid, which included talks with Nvidia, AMD and Intel, three of the top GPU manufacturers.

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Simon McIntosh-Smith, professor of high-performance computing at Bristol, declined to comment on potential plans to create an artificial intelligence research resource. HPE did not comment.

A spokesman for the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) stated, “No decisions have been made on where the Resource will be stored. It is completely wrong to say otherwise.

“We are committed to maintaining a thriving computing environment that supports the UK's position as a leader in science, innovation and technology. The funding for the AI ​​Research Resource is part of our £900 million investment in computing technology, as announced in the spring budget, to be provided by the UKRI.»

Artificial Intelligence

An Ofgem spokesperson said: «We acknowledge the challenges related to network latency and are working closely with both the industry and the government to address this issue.

“We launched a large-scale review of this issue earlier this year and are currently reviewing all responses and we will develop an action plan with DESNZ [Department of Energy Security and Net Zero] soon in the fall.”

Last month, The Telegraph reported that representatives from UK Research and Innovation and DSIT were preparing to buy up to 5,000 graphic processors as countries and tech giants race to increase the supply of in-demand chips.