UK waves £750M supercomputer contract at HPC builders

Pre-market charm offensive begins for Edinburgh's next national number-cruncher

The British government is putting out feelers to industry ahead of the procurement process for the country's most powerful supercomputer, set to begin next year.

UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) has issued a Preliminary Market Engagement Notice to get the attention of vendors that may have an interest in bidding to build the hardware for the Next National Supercomputing Service (NNSS), which will be based at the University of Edinburgh.

This will be delivered as part of the UK Compute Roadmap, and was disclosed in June as part of the Spending Review by Britain's finance minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves.

Key here is a promised investment of "up to £750 million (about $1 billion) for a new national supercomputer service in Edinburgh," from which the current estimated budget for the actual system is in the range of £300-330 million ($400-440 million).

The NNSS will provide a compute infrastructure for the UK's research and innovation communities to use modeling, simulation, and AI workflows, the Notice states.

UKRI says it intends to conduct pre-market engagement events next month, including potential face-to-face meetings with vendors attending the SC25 high-performance compute conference between November 17-20 at St. Louis, Missouri, in the US.

However, as a first step, it wants to hear from large-scale supercomputer makers, high-performance storage providers, and "supercomputer CPU and GPU manufacturers."

A tentative publication date for the tender is scheduled for February 4, 2026, with the caveat that the contract notice is subject to approval of the business case by the relevant UK government departments, including the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and the Treasury.

The contract is expected to cover September 2026 to August 2031, with a possible extension to August 2033.

As The Register has previously reported, this supercomputer project effectively replaces one due to be built at the same site which was cancelled by the Labour government not long after being elected last year.

The earlier system was talked up as becoming the UK's first exascale system, but it appears that goal is no longer considered a requirement.

Current plans are for the system to come online in 2027 and make use of "the next generation of advanced chips" to service both traditional modeling and simulation workloads, as well as AI development, with a projected capacity that UKRI says would put it in the top five supercomputers today.

As to who will win the contract, the frontrunners are likely to be HPE, which built the Isambard 3 and Isambard-AI systems for the Bristol Centre for Supercomputing (BriCS), or Atos, whose Eviden subsidiary assemble Jupiter, Europe's first exascale supercomputer.

However, Lenovo has also secured some HPC contracts, such as at the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) Hartree Centre last year, while Dell, IBM, and Fujitsu could also be contenders. ®