Just 24 hours after his appointment to a new, high-profile role as Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister, Darren Jones MP was championing the AI opportunity for the West. The MP for Bristol North West also highlighted the role of the University of Bristol and NCC in shaping this.
Speaking at an event in Westminster convened by UKAI and AI West alongside Fintech West, Darren reiterated the UK Government ambition to make the UK a tech superpower.
With fellow Bristol-based MP Claire Hazelgrove alongside him, special attention was paid to the strength of capability in her Filton and Bradley Stoke constituency. The constituency is home to NCC at the Bristol & Bath Science Park, in addition to a cluster of the world’s largest aerospace businesses at the Filton Enterprise Area.
NCC joined an exhibiting team from the University of Bristol, Bristol Centre for Supercomputing, and Invest Bristol & Bath to present Isambard-AI, the UK’s fastest AI supercomputer and the flagship project at the event. Developed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and backed by £225 million from UK Government, Isambard-AI is a unique national asset which was switched on at NCC earlier this year by the Rt Hon Peter Kyle MP, now Secretary of State for Business and Trade.
The supercomputer combines more than 5,400 Nvidia Grace Hopper superchips. With a peak performance of 21 AI exaflops - that’s 21 quintillion AI calculations per second - it can compute in a single second what the entire global population would take 80 years to calculate manually.
James Cooke, Head of Public Affairs, Regional & Research Partnerships at NCC said:
‘It was no surprise to see the West of England identified as an AI and Deep Tech Cluster in the Industrial Strategy. We are working closely with the West of England Combined Authority and our regional stakeholders to ensure that NCC enables the market pull and industrial commercialisation for the extraordinary research and compute capacity we now have in the West’.
‘We are working with internationally-recognised organisations to develop and integrate AI-driven digital engineering, creating immediate regional and national value. The support of our politicians, businesses and academic partners is critical to accelerating the UK AI Opportunities Action Plan and to maximising the potential of the AI ecosystem in the West’.
NCC innovations in digital and AI are already shaping advanced manufacturing and benefitting our regional partners. Click below to learn more.
From left: James Cooke, Darren Jones MP, Emma Rose, Emily Coles, Stephanie Poon
