The UK government is seeking cloud providers so as to support its ambition when it comes to increasing its AI compute capacity twentyfold by the end of this decade, in a deal that could be worth £250 million.
The plans have been announced by the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology for a procurement that looks out for cloud providers so as to help to ensure researchers from academia and public institutions, as well as SMEs, get access to the hardware they need.
As per a pre-market engagement notice, it wanted to speed up the innovation and also deliver transformative solutions when it comes to critical domains like energy, climate science, medicine, and advanced materials, therefore supporting economic growth and also public good by way of social value commitments.
The deal happens to be valued at £214.4 million, which excludes the component of VAT, and £250,000,000 inclusive of VAT, as per the notice, which goes on to offer information pertaining to how DSIT would like to engage with its suppliers.
By way of the deal, DSIT went on to say that it wanted to acquire a solution that goes on to integrate with the present portal, which is run by AI Research Resource – AIRR – the suite in terms of advanced supercomputers that offers compute capacity to academia, researchers, and the industry and also offers access to two present supercomputers, which are Isambard-AI at the University of Bristol as well as Dawn at the University of Cambridge.
DSIT remarked that it requires a baseline capacity of cloud resources that are accessible to the authorized users by way of the AIRR Portal, either offered directly or by way of a brokered and multi-cloud provider model. It is also seeking on-demand scalability in order to enable access to more GPU capacity that is beyond baseline capacity and also a managed service that will include orchestration for machine learning workloads, secure data storage, usage monitoring, and demand forecasting reporting, as well as active security management. Technical support along with integration also comes as a part of the package.
Isambard-AI, which is billed as the most powerful supercomputer in Britain, came online in the summer. It is based upon the HPE Cray EX4000 system and also incorporates over 5,000 Nvidia Grace-Hopper GPUs. It is forecasted to deliver more than 21 exaFLOPS of 8-bit floating-point performance when it comes to LLM training and over 250 petaFLOPS of 64-bit performance.
On the other hand, Intel, Dell, and the University of Cambridge are developing Dawn, which is also going to support workloads that include academic as well as industrial research, engineering, healthcare, and climate modeling.
Recently, the government went on to promise a package of reforms as well as investment in order to put AI at the heart of the mission by the government in order to drive growth, come up with jobs, and also spread prosperity throughout the country. Apparently, it goes on to include almost £100 million of government support when it comes to British startups.
In the House of Commons, Ian Murray, the minister for digital government and data, said the AI roadmap of the government had been delayed because of the change in technology minister in September 2025.