A powerful new supercomputer will be built in Edinburgh after all, the chancellor has announced.
Up to £750m has been put aside for the project, Rachel Reeves revealed as part of her spending review.
The Conservatives, when in government, had previously pledged £800m for the project but in August, Labour scrapped the plans, claiming it was part of “unfunded commitments”.
“We are investing in Scotland’s renewal, so working people are better off,” said Ms Reeves on Wednesday.
On Monday, one of the leading figures in AI, the chief executive of NVIDIA, told the prime minister the UK had all the ingredients to be a leader in AI except for the infrastructure.
“You can’t do machine learning without a machine. The ability to build AI supercomputers here in the UK will naturally attract more AI startups” and create a better ecosystem, said Jensen Huang at London Tech Week.
The UK is the third-largest AI market in the world and if the technology is “fully embraced”, it could bring £47bn to the economy every year, according to the government.
This new computer, built at the University of Edinburgh, will “give scientists from across the UK the compute power they need,” according to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.
It will be the most powerful in the UK and work alongside the AI research resource, which is a developing network of the UK’s most powerful supercomputers.
