The University of Edinburgh has said it will fight to secure funding for its £800 million ($1.02 billion) supercomputer in the wake of the UK government declining to move forward with the project, citing budget restraints.

In October 2023 it was announced the university would host the UK’s first exascale computer, which had been slated to go live in 2025.

However, despite the university having already spent £31m ($38m) building a new wing of its EPCC’s purpose-built Advanced Computing Facility to house the system, on August 2, 2024, the UK government announced it would not be handing over £1.3bn ($1.66bn) in funding for tech and AI projects that the previous administration had announced.

In a statement to DCD at the time, a spokesperson for the Department for Science, Innovation, and Technology said the “government is taking difficult and necessary spending decisions across all departments in the face of billions of pounds of unfunded commitments.”

According to a report in The Times, in the wake of the announcement, Sir Peter Mathieson – Vice-Chancellor at the University of Edinburgh – has been personally lobbying ministers in an attempt to get the funding restored.

In an email to university staff, Mathieson wrote: “We will continue to engage with the Department for Science, Innovation, and Technology on this evolving situation and work with academia and industry to lobby strongly for the investment to be reinstated.”

He added that the university has led the way in supercomputing within the UK for decades, and remains “committed to our place as the center for supercomputing and AI in the UK.”

Should the system be funded and brought online, it would be 50 times more powerful than the UK’s current top-end system, ARCHER2, which is also housed in Edinburgh.