Nvidia will spend more than $100 million on its UK supercomputer, as it looks to woo British regulators.
The GPU company is in the midst of acquiring UK-based chip designer Arm for $40 billion, but the deal will have to be approved by UK, EU, US, and Chinese regulators.
The Cambridge-1 supercomputer will cost “$100m, just as a starting point," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said. The company previously said it would invest $55m in the supercomputer.
Located at the Kao Data campus in Harlow, the system will initially feature 80 Nvidia DGX A100 systems combined, for 400 petaflops of 'AI compute,' or eight petaflops of standard Linpack performance.
The supercomputer was announced at the same time as Nvidia's acquisition of Cambridge-based Arm. Nvidia is negotiating with Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Health Secretary Matt Hancock to officially open the data center.
The investment comes as the UK government's Competition and Markets Authority investigates the Arm deal for national security risks or monopoly concerns.
Microsoft, Google, Qualcomm, Graphcore, and others have written to the CMA asking for it to block the deal - with some saying they would invest in Arm themselves.
Nvidia has said that it expects the acquisition to go through early next year, although it also faces a tough investigation from US, EU, and Chinese regulators. In China, an ongoing civil war between different Arm factions also risks delaying the deal.
