DAWN Phase 1 FY2023-2024: A UK Industry Academic Co-design Partnership Delivering a Pre-Exascale Research Cloud for AI and Simulation

By autumn 2023, the UK will double its open-access GPU computing power for AI and simulation through a new system called Dawn Phase 1, built with Dell and Intel covering the full £35 million capital cost. This matters because the UK’s computing capacity for artificial intelligence and complex simulations—used in everything from drug discovery to climate modelling—has been falling behind demand. The Future of Compute review identified this gap as a critical bottleneck for both academic research and industrial innovation. Dawn Phase 1 directly addresses that shortfall by providing a pre-exascale research cloud open to all UKRI researchers and UK industry, with a cloud-style interface to lower barriers for companies that lack dedicated supercomputing teams. If successful, this infrastructure will accelerate AI-driven breakthroughs in areas such as materials design, energy grid optimisation, and medical diagnostics—systems that quietly underpin modern life but depend on massive computational power. The STFC funding requested here covers only the essential data centre infrastructure, storage, and power for the first year; the computing hardware itself is fully funded by industry partners. This is primarily an engineering and infrastructure project, not fundamental science, but without it, much of the UK’s fundamental and applied research would lack the computational tools to proceed.