Trending Articles
Trending Topics
Trending
Nvidia, HPE and the University of Bristol today unveiled the UK’s most powerful supercomputer, Isambard-AI. Its aim: to give UK researchers, and businesses, an instant AI boost.
Backed by £225 million of government money, it should help discover new drugs, advance our understanding of climate modelling and provide breakthroughs in materials science. And in fact it already is.
Phase 1 of the project, which included 168 Nvidia GH200 Grace Hopper superchips, finished in summer 2024. Between January and early June 2025, almost 60 different research projects took advantage, using around 100,000 GPU hours in total. But that really is just the start: Phase 2 saw a huge jump to a total of 5,448 GH200 superchips.
Here’s how researchers are using the Isambard-AI supercomputer, with five flagship projects kicking things off.
BritLLM is, as its name suggests, a very British large language model. Designed to be used by government services – including healthcare and education – it promises to promote inclusivity.
“Isambard-AI is the most exciting development for natural language processing research, and LLM research in particular, in the UK to date,” said Pontus Stenetorp, Professor of NLP at University College London at ISC 2025.
“We have already been able to produce state-of-the-art, multilingual LLMs with the help of Isambard-AI and over the next few years it is our hope that with access to these resources we will be able to answer fundamental questions about how LLMs operate.”
BritLLM is trained on British languages – including Welsh – and aims to promote inclusivity and better delivery of public services such as healthcare and education.
Trained on NHS data, Nightingale AI is a sovereign, multimodal health foundation model. The idea: to personalise care and make diagnoses earlier.
“We are launching a major AI program to harness the vast resources of UK healthcare and biomedical data,” said Professor Aldo Faisal, Director of the UKRI Centres in AI for Healthcare at Imperial College London, earlier this year when Nightingale AI was first announced.
“Our goal is to develop a novel generation of AI foundation models, trained exclusively on healthcare data rather than generic text. This approach will enable us to create a truly transformative system tailored for the medical community.”
University College London (UCL) has been at the forefront of using AI to better detect and treat cancer, and is already part of the £10 million Cancer Data-Driven Detection programme. Using Isambard-AI, it aims to develop the first scalable AI system for prostate cancer detection via MRI, with the promise of faster diagnoses and tailored treatments.
The University of Liverpool is the place to go for inorganic materials discovery. Now, backed by Isambard-AI, it will hunt through 68 million chemical combinations to see which look most promising as sustainable industrial materials. This should reduce our reliance on rare, toxic materials.
And what about the University of Bristol, home of Isambard-AI? It wants to analyse recordings from wearable cameras and similar smart devices to spot behaviours in people’s own homes. It could mean the difference between someone with a mild form of dementia living in their own house or being transferred to a nursing home.
