Isambard-AI powers UK research in its first year

Isambard-AI, the UK’s most powerful AI supercomputer, has completed its first year supporting research across health, climate, agriculture and AI safety. Built and run by the Bristol Centre for Supercomputing at the University of Bristol with HPE and NVIDIA, the UK Government-funded £225 million facility has supported around 1,000 research projects involving more than 4,000 users in its first year.

Projects using the system include work on Alzheimer’s disease using NHS data, sovereign UK large language models for Welsh, Scottish Gaelic and Cornish, high-resolution air pollution models, and research into heart disease, cancer and AI security. At Bristol Veterinary School, researchers are applying AI to video data from dairy cattle to detect early signs of illness and improve animal welfare.

With every call for access oversubscribed, the Bristol Centre for Supercomputing is preparing new AI inference services and the Bristol AI Data Facility (BRAID). The system uses renewable electricity and is ranked among the world’s most energy-efficient supercomputers, aligning expanded AI capability with sustainability goals.