AIRR DAWN Phase 1 FY2024-2028: 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 computing power for artificial intelligence and simulation with a new system called Dawn Phase 1. The system is a pre-exascale research cloud—meaning it can perform nearly a billion billion calculations per second—built through a partnership between UK Research and Innovation, Dell, and Intel. Dell and Intel are covering the full £35 million capital cost of the GPU hardware, while the STFC funding request covers the essential data centre infrastructure, storage, and power needed to run it. This matters because UK researchers and companies currently face a shortage of high-performance computing capacity for AI and simulation work. The Future of Compute review identified this gap as a bottleneck for scientific progress and industrial innovation. Dawn Phase 1 is designed to be open to all UKRI-funded researchers and UK industry, with a cloud interface that lowers the barriers to access. If successful, the system will accelerate research in areas that depend on intensive computation—drug discovery, climate modelling, materials design, and AI training. It will also allow UK industry to test and develop AI applications without needing to build their own expensive supercomputing facilities. The project is primarily an infrastructure investment, not fundamental science, but it will enable fundamental and applied research across many fields.