The UK Treasury has set aside a budget of £900 million to invest in the development of a supercomputer that would be powerful enough to chew through more than one billion billion simple calculations a second. A new exascale computer would fit the bill, for utilization by newly established advanced AI research bodies. It is speculated that one key goal is to establish a "BritGPT" system. The British government has been keeping tabs on recent breakthroughs in large language models, the most notable example being OpenAI's ChatGPT. Ambitions to match such efforts were revealed in a statement, with the emphasis: "to advance UK sovereign capability in foundation models, including large language models."

The current roster of United Kingdom-based supercomputers looks to be unfit for the task of training complex AI models. In light of being outpaced by drives in other countries to ramp up supercomputer budgets, the UK Government outlined its own future investments: "Because AI needs computing horsepower, I today commit around £900 million of funding, for an exascale supercomputer," said the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt. The government has declared that quantum technologies will receive an investment of £2.5 billion over the next decade. Proponents of the technology have declared that it will supercharge machine learning.Two weeks ago, the UK governmental Department for Science and Technology, announced ambitious plans to make the nation a science and technology superpower by the year 2030. This sprawling national effort has been dubbed the 'UK Science and Technology Framework'. The framework identifies five key areas that the UK deems as critical technologies: "Artificial Intelligence (AI), engineering biology, future telecommunications, semiconductors, and quantum computing."

It also details a few initial projects, including £370 million ($440 million) in funding for AI research and the founding of a new quantum computing research facility. An unbudgeted announcement of plans for an exascale supercomputer facility was also made.Zoubin Ghahramani, a University of Cambridge professor and vice president of research at Google, has written to the UK Government and made key recommendations for targeted areas of technological growth: "First, we need a strategic vision, roadmap, and national coordination. The UK's public compute infrastructure is fragmented and we do not currently have a long-term plan. We need a national coordination body to deliver the vision for compute, that can provide long-term stability and adapt to the rapid pace of change in compute technology. Second, we need to make immediate investments in the path to exascale compute, using a phased approach outlined in this review, so that we are not falling behind our peers. Third, we need to increase capacity for AI research immediately to power the UK's impressive AI research community and plan for further AI capacity as part of our exascale system."

The United States, European Union and China are the only international bodies with officially announced plans for funding of exascale computer systems. The United Kingdom would be the fourth to join in with similar efforts, but this hinges on investments being fully approved by its government. The country only possesses a 1.3 percent share of the global compute capacity, and no individual UK system is present in the top 25 of the Top 500 list of most powerful supercomputers around the world.