Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak plans to spend 100 million pounds ($130 million) on thousands of high-performance artificial intelligence chips in order to catch up in the global computing power race.

It is reported that British government officials have been in discussions with IT giants such as Nvidia, AMD and Intel to purchase chips for so-called "national artificial intelligence research resources" as part of Sunak's ambition to make the UK a global leader in AI.

The work, led by research and innovation UK (UK Research and Innovation), a science funding agency, is believed to be in the late stages of negotiations with Nvidia. The UK will buy 5000 GPU from Nvidia, whose chips power artificial intelligence models such as ChatGPT.

According to people familiar with the matter, £100m has been allocated. However, the spending is seen as insufficient to meet the government's ambitions for artificial intelligence, and officials are urging Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor of the exchequer, to allocate more money in the coming months.

GPU is a key component in building artificial intelligence systems such as ChatGPT, and the latest version of ChatGPT is trained with as many as 25000 Nvidia chips.

Sunak outlined Britain's plans to become an artificial intelligence superpower, but it lags far behind the US and Europe in terms of the computing resources needed to train, test and operate complex models.

A government assessment released this year criticized the lack of "dedicated artificial intelligence computing resources" in the UK and that researchers could use fewer than 1000 high-end Nvidia chips. The report recommends that at least 3000 "top-level" GPU should be provided as soon as possible.

In March, Hunt agreed to set aside 900 million pounds ($1.15 billion) for computing resources, although most of the money is expected to be spent on the development of traditional supercomputers.

The amount of money allocated to artificial intelligence resources is believed to be slightly more than 50 million pounds ($63.7 million), but with the global scramble for chips that support artificial intelligence, the amount is expected to rise to between 70 million and 100m pounds ($89 million-$130 million).

British officials are likely to urge the government to release more money in the autumn budget statement, which is likely to be released during the artificial intelligence security summit in November.

Last week, it was reported that Saudi Arabia had purchased at least 3000 Nvidia H100 processors, the company's high-end components used to train artificial intelligence, at a price of $40,000 each. Tech giants such as Microsoft, Amazon and Google are also competing to buy tens of thousands of AI chips.

It is not clear what type of chip the UK is negotiating to buy. GPU will be used to build artificial intelligence research resources, which the government hopes will be put into use next summer.

British officials are also weighing the merits of sovereign chatbots, a publicly funded language model similar to ChatGPT, and looking for ways to promote the deployment of artificial intelligence in public services such as the National Health Service (NHS).

Although Nvidia's chips are widely used to train artificial intelligence and are seen as the clear front-runner, the UK government has also been in discussions with a number of microchip companies.

Sunak is promoting the UK as a centre for setting global standards for the development of artificial intelligence security. He has taken the lead in drawing up plans for the artificial intelligence security summit, which is expected to be held in Bletchley Park, the password-breaking center of World War II. It is hoped that the event will prompt governments and top artificial intelligence companies to reach an international agreement to develop the technology.

A government spokesman said: "We are committed to supporting the UK's booming computing environment to maintain our global leadership in science, innovation and technology."

Nvidia had no comment.

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