The British government is investing heavily in the national computing infrastructure. With an additional investment of approximately $49 million, the DAWN supercomputer at the University of Cambridge is being expanded.
This is according to Neowin. This expansion will increase the total computing power of the system by a factor of six. The aim is to enable researchers and technology companies to compete more effectively with players from the United States and China.
The expansion is expected to be operational in the spring of 2026. DAWN will receive new hardware specifically designed for large-scale AI workloads. The extra capacity is intended for research in sectors where high computing performance is essential. Examples include medical imaging, climate and environmental models, and the digitization of public services. According to the government, the extra computing power can help to significantly accelerate innovation in these areas.
Switch to AMD
At the heart of the upgrade is the introduction of AMD Instinct MI355X processors, based on the CDNA4 architecture. They will replace the Intel chips. The AI accelerators will be made available to researchers for the first time via national infrastructure. The integration of the new chips into the existing DAWN environment will be carried out by Dell, which was previously involved in the construction of the system. With the switch to AMD, the United Kingdom is consciously expanding the number of technology partners it relies on for strategic computing facilities.
Access to the expanded supercomputer is provided through the AI Research Resource program. Within that program, eligible scientists and small businesses can use the infrastructure free of charge. In this way, the government wants to prevent projects with very large datasets or complex AI models from failing due to the high costs of commercial supercomputers.
According to the British government, the expansion not only delivers technological benefits, but also has a direct social impact. Applications such as personalized cancer treatments and more accurate climate predictions for disaster planning are explicitly mentioned as examples of research that benefits from additional computing capacity. For startups, the expansion lowers the threshold for developing and training advanced AI models without having to rely on large cloud providers.
Together with the Isambard AI supercomputer in Bristol, DAWN is part of the AI Research Resource initiative, which was launched in the summer of 2025. This program is part of a broader government investment of approximately $2.7 billion in public computing infrastructure. With this investment, the United Kingdom aims to strengthen its position as a European center for science and innovation, with the Oxford-Cambridge region as an important focal point.
The expansion of DAWN is an intermediate step towards a much greater ambition. The government wants to increase the total capacity of AIRR by a factor of twenty by 2030. Later phases of this national computing strategy include plans to build a new supercomputer in Edinburgh.