AMD has announced plans to invest up to £2 billion over the next five years in the UK to accelerate AI innovation and research and expand access to the compute resources needed for long-term economic growth and scientific leadership across the country.
Speaking at London Tech Week, AMD Chair and CEO Dr. Lisa Su said: “AMD has been in the UK for over 50 years, but over the last five years, in particular, we’ve significantly ramped up our talent and engineering, right here in the UK because of the incredible capabilities that come here from both the research ecosystem, as well as the entrepreneurship, as well as the large enterprise ecosystem here.”
Su outlined a series of investments and strategic collaborations designed to help accelerate the UK’s AI ecosystem and broaden access to the advanced computing that underpins scientific discovery and public-sector innovation.
The initiatives align with the UK’s AI Opportunities Action Plan and AI Hardware Strategy, supporting broader national priorities to build world-class AI infrastructure, develop technical talent and accelerate AI adoption.
“The United Kingdom has the talent, research excellence, and ambition to help lead the next era of AI,” said Su. “AMD is proud to deepen our commitment to the UK and work with partners across government, academia, and industry to expand access to the compute infrastructure needed to advance sovereign AI, accelerate discovery, and drive long-term economic growth.”
The announcement was welcomed by UK government leaders as a significant step toward strengthening the country’s AI infrastructure, research ecosystem and long-term economic competitiveness.
“This investment is a major vote of confidence in Britain’s place as a global AI superpower. We’ve got the talent, the world-class universities and the ambition to lead, and partnerships like this help turn that potential into real progress,” said Rachel Reeves, Chancellor of the Exchequer. “It will drive more cutting-edge research here in the UK, open up opportunities for people to build the skills they need for the jobs of the future, and speed up breakthroughs that can improve people’s lives and grow our economy.”
“This investment reflects the strength of Britain’s talent, research and ambition in AI – but also the infrastructure we are putting in place to match it,” said Liz Kendall, Technology Secretary. “With world-class chip designers, leading universities, and partners such as AMD choosing to invest here, we are building the compute capability needed to power innovation, drive growth, create jobs, and ensure the most advanced AI technologies are developed in the UK.”
There has been a lot of progress in AI over the last three years, but Su believes that we are still early in the cycle.
“We’ve clearly seen AI go from what was a distant research initiative to something that everybody is using … but we are still so, so early in the … research and development phase as we think about new models and where they’re going. We’re early in AI for science in terms of what AI can do to really push the frontiers of science, and we’re still very early in AI for enterprises.
“Every month, we’re seeing in enterprise that we’re taking AI from something that we experiment with to something that actually changes the way we do business.”
New strategic collaborations to advance AI research and infrastructure
Building on its recently announced work with Oxford Quantum Circuits (OQC) and JPMorganChase, AMD also announced a collaboration with Imperial College London to advance computational science and support research that relies on large-scale computing resources, including healthcare innovation and climate modelling.
AMD and Imperial also intend to explore opportunities to optimise AI models, scientific workflows and data-intensive applications on AMD compute platforms and AMD ROCm open software.
Additionally, AMD is collaborating with Oriole Networks in support of the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) Scaling Inference Lab, a national initiative designed to address critical AI infrastructure bottlenecks.
The effort combines Oriole’s PRISM photonic networking architecture with AMD Instinct GPUs and AMD EPYC processors to evaluate new approaches for scaling inference workloads while improving performance and energy efficiency and reducing latency.
The initiative supports what is expected to be the world’s first large-scale AI system powered by a pure photonic network, an important step toward infrastructure technologies that can support future generations of AI systems in the UK.
“What I am very passionate about is ensuring AI infrastructure is an enabling capability that everybody in the world has access to,” said Su.
Expanding national AI supercomputing capacity
AMD and Dell Technologies are working with the University of Cambridge on its expanding national AI infrastructure footprint, including the new Zenith AI supercomputer and the Sunrise fusion AI system developed in collaboration with the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA).
“We’re announcing the expansion of our partnernership with Cambridge University, in terms of putting in high-performance computes, as well as Imperial College in terms of research development, as well as just overall the idea of ‘we want to invest here in the UK’ because it is good for business overall for AMD,” said Su.
Zenith is a significant new UK AI-for-science platform, funded by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), designed and operated by the University of Cambridge, and built with AMD and Dell technology.
Sunrise is a second AI supercomputer powered by AMD and Dell being built now, funded by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ), owned by UKAEA, and operated by the University of Cambridge. Sunrise is part of a long standing UKAEA-University of Cambridge partnership and dedicated to the fusion mission.
Together, these systems support a broad range of AI-for-science applications including healthcare research, climate modelling, materials science, engineering simulation, fusion research and scientific AI model development.
Supporting the UK’s national AI future
By combining strategic investments with research and ecosystem partnerships, AMD is helping expand the UK’s computing capabilities and supporting the next generation of scientific and technological breakthroughs. The company will continue working with government, academia and industry to strengthen the foundations for long-term competitiveness and global leadership in AI.
