The government of The United Kingdom is going to dedicate around 125 million dollars to boost the development of hardware for AI, as well as to support the sector to counteract situations of shortage of chips that may occur, according to The Telegraph. The public sector organizations that will be in charge of this investment are UK Research and Development and the UK Department of Science, Innovation and Technology.
The amount earmarked for these purposes will be used to develop chips ready for use with generative AI models. Specifically, in addition, the game will be used, among other purposes, for the purchase of 5,000 Nvidia GPUs. The goal of the investment is to create a government-funded AI resource similar to the US National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource Task Force.
In addition, the United Kingdom plans to allocate more than 1.1 billion dollars to the development of the national computing capacity. Among the measures that will be financed with this amount is the construction of an exascale supercomputer. These investments are in addition to those approved last March in the country: more than 4.4 billion dollars for technology and innovation, which included more than 1.2 billion dollars for Artificial Intelligence and supercomputing.
These investments are part of a global competition between countries to be at the forefront of the AI sector. The UK, which only accounts for 0.5% of global chip sales, is struggling to compete with the European Union, the United States and China.
Meanwhile, countries like Germany are continually redoubling their investment efforts to advance AI and compete with other nations as well. Above all, with China and the US, countries that currently dominate the sector. Currently, the Artificial Intelligence sector contributes about $4.6 billion to the British economyand it is estimated that it employs some 50,000 people.
