UK to invest £900m in supercomputer in bid to build own 'BritGPT'

The UK government is to invest £900m in a cutting-edge supercomputer as part of an artificial intelligence strategy that includes ensuring the country can build its own "BritGPT". The treasury outlined plans to spend around £900m on building an exascale computer, which would be several times more powerful than the UK's biggest computers, and establishing a new AI research body. An exascale computer can be used for training complex AI models, but also have other uses across science, industry and defence, including modelling weather forecasts and climate projections. The Treasury said the £900m investment will "allow researchers to better understand climate change, power the discovery of new drugs and maximise our potential in AI.". An exascale computer is one that can carry out more than one billion billion simple calculations a second, a metric known as an "exaflops".