UK Lends £1.3 Billion Funding For Businesses And Startups Working On AI Projects

The newly elected UK Labour government has just pulled funding of £1.3 billion allocated to technology and artificial intelligence (AI) projects by the previous Conservative administration.

This funding package, which included £800m for the exascale supercomputer and £500m for the AI Research Resource.

Shadow Science Secretary Andrew Griffith attacked the decision, saying it foreshadowed further cuts under Labour.

It had planned to install the UK’s first exascale supercomputer, capable of one billion billion calculations per second – 50 times faster than any machine in the UK.

The University of Edinburgh already hosts Archer2, the national supercomputer, and £31 million had already been invested in infrastructure to house the exascale system.