The U.K. government has announced a £100 million investment in AI hardware development, as part of its efforts to become a global leader in the field. The funding will be used to support the development of chips and other hardware that can be used to power AI applications, such as self-driving cars and medical diagnosis tools.
The investment is being made by the U.K. Research and Innovation (UKRI) agency, and will be used to support a range of projects, including the development of new AI chips, the creation of a national AI research facility, and the training of AI talent.
Amid limited semiconductor supply due to the pandemic and geopolitics, nations vie to be stable sources for essential chips used in AI tech. The U.K. is boosting AI by investing £100 million for specialized chips and an exascale supercomputer, alongside a prior £3.5 billion allocation including £1 billion for AI and supercomputing.
The U.K. is also scheduled to host an AI Safety Summit this fall, likely in November, to try to hash out standards for safe use of artificial intelligence, particularly frontier solutions, meaning future-looking machine learning models.
The sources for this piece include an article in TechRepublic.