Britain on Thursday switched on Isambard-AI, a £225 million supercomputer housed at the University of Bristol that immediately becomes the country’s most powerful artificial-intelligence system. Built with 5,448 Nvidia GH200 Grace Hopper chips, the liquid-cooled machine can deliver up to 21 exaflops of AI performance—more than the combined output of all other UK supercomputers—and ranks among the world’s most energy-efficient installations. The launch, carried out by Science Secretary Peter Kyle, anchors a wider £1 billion government programme aimed at increasing public compute capacity twenty-fold by 2030. Under the plan, Isambard-AI will be linked with the Dawn system in Cambridge to form the AI Research Resource, while Edinburgh is set to host the first of several new National Supercomputing Centres. Isambard-AI is expected to accelerate work on medical imaging, drug discovery, climate modelling and large language models tailored to UK languages. University College London researchers, for example, are already using the system to develop AI tools that identify prostate-cancer patients needing treatment sooner. The project deepens Nvidia’s push into so-called sovereign AI as governments seek domestic infrastructure for data-intensive research. Chief Executive Jensen Huang last month urged Prime Minister Keir Starmer to expand compute resources, saying access to high-performance systems is essential to maintain the UK’s edge in artificial-intelligence research.