Government reinstates funding for Edinburgh University supercomputer

The UK Government has confirmed funding of up to £750m for this supercomputer in a spending review on Wednesday.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves confirmed the investment which comes after a period of uncertainty for the University’s advanced computing facility.

Reeves noted “We are investing in Scotland’s renewal, so working people are better off. Strong investment in our science and technology sector is part of our Plan for Change to kickstart economic growth, and as the home of the UK’s largest supercomputer, Scotland will be an integral part of that journey.”

The new supercomputer will be housed in a new wing of the Advanced Computing Facility (ACF) operated by EPCC and its team of staff at the university’s Easter Bush facility.

This will give scientists across the UK access to compute power on a world-leading scale.

It places the university at the centre of a nation-wide effort to drive technological innovations and support industry through computing and innovations in AI technology.

The university also claims this decision will protect jobs which may otherwise have been lost from Scotland and provide further investments and benefits to the regional economy.

The Edinburgh supercomputer is expected to be the most powerful in Britain.

The decision to resume funding for the project comes after Labour pulled £800m which had been promised to the university.

They claimed the previous Conservative government had failed to allocate the money properly.

This resulted in backlash from tech experts who complained there had been long delays to invested in a British supercomputer, and that the UK was beginning to fall behind their peers in this field.

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Additionally, when the project was pulled, the university had already spend £30m on infrastructure in the machine which would be able to produce a billion billion operations per second.

In January 2025, Secretary of State for Scotland, Ian Murray, told Holyrood that the supercomputer had never been “cancelled” but instead was being “reassessed”.

Following this and the reinvestment into Edinburgh’s supercomputer, Sir Peter Mathieson, the university’s principal stated: “This significant investment will have a profoundly positive impact on the UK’s global standing, and we welcome the vast opportunities it will create for research and innovation.

“Building on the University of Edinburgh’s expertise and experience over decades, this powerful supercomputer will drive economic growth by supporting advancements in medicine, bolstering emerging industries and public services, and unlocking the full potential of AI.”

Once in operation the supercomputer will provide high-performance computing capability for key research and industry projects across the UK.

Professor Mark Parsons, the director of EPCC and Dean of Research Computing at the university said:

“I am incredibly proud that we have been confirmed to host the UK’s new national supercomputer.

“These are immensely complex systems, and we will use everything we have learned over the past 30 years to run the best possible service for our thousands of users across the UK’s scientific and industrial research communities.”

The new supercomputer will vastly exceed the capacity of ARCHER2, the current national supercomputer also hosted by Edinburgh University.

It will work alongside the forthcoming AI research resource, a network of the UK’s most powerful supercomputers.

Images supplied by The University of Edinburgh.