Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister of Britain, is all set to put out around $130 million to purchase thousands of computer chips that would be powering artificial intelligence amidst a very global race and shortage for computing power. The Telegraph went on to report, on the 20th of August, that the country had been aiming to build an AI Research Resource by the middle of 2024, which would be a major part of the Prime Minister’s plans of making the country an AI tech hub.
The government, on its part, has been reportedly sourcing the chips from NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel, and it is usually understood that the funding body behind it, UK Research and Innovation, is in the late stages of ordering around 5,000 NVIDIA graphic processing units.
Rishi Sunak Has Allocated Funds For AI Development
However, around $130 million has already been allocated to this project by Rishi Sunak, and the funds are being seen as insufficient to match the AI Hub ambition of the Prime Minister, which means that most government officials could very well pressurize for more funding in a November AI safety summit. This would then follow a recent report that most companies have been struggling to deploy AI specifically due to available resources and a lot of obstacles from a technical perspective.
In March, an independent review of the computing capabilities of Rishi Sunak’s country’s AI stated that the investment in space was quite lagging behind a lot of the international counterparts in the United States and the European Union. At that time, less than 1,000 NVIDIA chips were available for the researchers to train the many AI models.
