Under the U.K.’s “AI Opportunities Action Plan,” the government has set itself an ambitious goal of increasing the country’s data center capacity by as much as 20-fold by the end of the decade siliconangle.com/2025/01/12/u... #AI #HPC - ThreadSky

hpcguru.bsky.social • 46 days ago

Under the U.K.’s “AI Opportunities Action Plan,” the government has set itself an ambitious goal of increasing the country’s data center capacity by as much as 20-fold by the end of the decade

https://siliconangle.com/2025/01/12/u-k-pm-keir-starmer-announce-new-plans-transform-country-ai-superpower/

#AI #HPC

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hpcguru.bsky.social•46 days ago

Britain seeks to build homegrown rival to OpenAI in bid to become world leader in artificial intelligence

https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/business/money-report/britain-seeks-to-build-homegrown-rival-to-openai-in-bid-to-become-world-leader-in-artificial-intelligence/3644136/

#AI #HPC

hpcguru.bsky.social•46 days ago

The plans for a new #supercomputer to drive the government's #AI plans are also puzzling as one of the new Labour government's early announcements was the cancellation of an £800 million exascale supercomputer project launched by the previous government

https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/13/uk_government_ai_plans/

#HPC

hpcguru.bsky.social•46 days ago

Can the UK government achieve its ambition to become an #AI powerhouse?

The artificial intelligence opportunities action plan has been largely well received, but there are plenty of questions about how it will be achieved

https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366617959/Can-UK-government-achieve-ambition-to-become-AI-powerhouse

#HPC

jefflayton.bsky.social•45 days ago

This goes to my question. Are they really serious? A new government will immediately eject the plans and months later come up with "their own."

cjcshadowsan.bsky.social•46 days ago

So... It's an action plan that says "Let's build infrastructure capacity to make ourselves attractive to tech companies"

"Let's do a renewal initiative to re-industrialise de-industrialised areas, just re-zoning them for a different industry."

It's a path-of-least-resistance approach.

hpcwrangler.com•46 days ago

yea.. but one that says nothing about how (in reality) we'd power all this extra compute.

Has zero idea on how we might actually foster an economic or technical environment that would encourage investment.

If a founder dropped a pitch deck like that in front of a VC they'd be laughed at.

hpcwrangler.com•46 days ago

I smell "more business for my mates" type deals in the making to appease big tech titans.

cjcshadowsan.bsky.social•46 days ago

Already mentioned it - One of the biggest risks when it comes to AI is the risk of it creating a two-tier environment.

In the #HPC / #AI arms race... Who loses? It's the businesses who can't afford to generate business benefit from it because they're not large enough to.

Think #SMEs.

overyonder.bsky.social•46 days ago

Straying from practices aligned with their EU neighbors limits potential opportunities for monetization. Power seems to be a significant concern - many people already struggle to afford heating, which makes it frustrating data center operators might suddenly gain access to vast amounts of energy.

overyonder.bsky.social•46 days ago

Reducing reliance on tech giants seem like a great idea, but remains complex. Many “open” and “equitable” solutions being developed at many universities often depend on LLMs like Meta’s Llama, which feels disingenuous upon closer examination.

chromamagic.com•46 days ago

I’m always a little queasy with government getting quite so close to the AI hype machine.

$100M here in our state, it’s budget dust for the legislature and corporate plays but still.

https://www.mass.gov/news/governor-healey-announces-massachusetts-ai-hub-to-make-state-global-leader-in-applied-ai-innovation

chromamagic.com•44 days ago

The guru already kindly already reposted this but here’s that giant Massachusetts AI gig for the above that was recently released.

Nerves of steel and extreme political acumen required (not actually in the job description, but if you know, you know)

https://bsky.app/profile/chromamagic.com/post/3lfppdpazec2k

chromamagic.com•46 days ago

Pages 22 and 23 of the attached PDF about “competitive landscape” is interesting, “hey state/country X is doing Y, we need to do something” is a familiar design pattern.

All aboard the train, next stop Trancentral.

https://www.mass.gov/doc/massachusetts-ai-strategic-task-force-2024-report-to-the-governor/download

techjournalism.bsky.social•46 days ago

It will be interesting to see if the incentives move the needle. The price of power has historically been the challenge for data center growth in Massachusetts, at least for the scale projects. But seeing more construction in NJ and even Connecticut, so perhaps rising tide floats all boats.

chromamagic.com•46 days ago

Yup. At my last gig I had one call with governor’s office, spent the whole time asking that they double down on MGHPCC. I’m biased but it’s the only sensible way to capitalize on the original $100M we first put in to build the building in 2013.

christosargyrop.bsky.social•46 days ago

So the UK will be building nukes? My understanding is that the power situation is not great over there

chromamagic.com•46 days ago

Yeah. This is an unfunded power mandate for sure. £/MWHr is gonna blow the whole budget. 🤣

christosargyrop.bsky.social•46 days ago

Everyone quick, buy raspberry PIs

danielskatz.bsky.social•46 days ago

I heard about this is a visit to ORCD last week 🙂

chromamagic.com•46 days ago

Neato, glad you were able to catch up with Chris and the gang!!!

jefflayton.bsky.social•45 days ago

Where's the power going to come from?

hpcnotes.bsky.social•45 days ago

It’s not very much power.

20x is the headline but the rest is “by 2030” with some details in the footnotes about future performance increases of GPUs etc.

So only a handful of MW if that holds, maybe 20MW at most.

Nothing like the GW that hyperscaler AI implies.

jefflayton.bsky.social•45 days ago

So less than 1 MW per DC?

hpcnotes.bsky.social•45 days ago

Ah, more crossed headlines, I hadn’t spotted that. I was referring to 20x supercomputing.

AI DC growth is a whole different axis and basically seems to be easing private sector to build out DCs so I suspect the answer to “where’s the power” is assumed to be “that’s the private sector’s problem” 😁

jefflayton.bsky.social•45 days ago

LOL - yeah. That's the sign of great political leadership - set large goals and make achieving them some else's problem.

hpcnotes.bsky.social•45 days ago

sounds reasonable to me :-)

jefflayton.bsky.social•45 days ago

It was a melange of things call CYA based. The new government doesn't seem to have a clue, but I'm not in position to say anything because of where I live :)

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