UK plans to spend$130 million on GPUs as a'national AI research resource'

　　British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak plans to spend 100 million pounds($130 million)on thousands of high-performance artificial intelligence chips in a bid to catch up in the global race for computing power.

　　British government officials are understood to have been in discussions with IT giants such as Nvidia,AMD and Intel to procure chips for a so-called"national AI research resource"as part of Sunak's ambition to make the UK a global leader in artificial intelligence.

　　The work is being led by the UK's research and innovation science funding agency,and talks with Nvidia are believed to be at an advanced stage.The UK bought 5,000 GPUs,the chips that power AI models like ChatGPT.

　　According to people familiar with the matter,£100 million has already been disbursed.However,the spending was deemed insufficient to meet the government's AI ambitions,with officials urging Chancellor Jeremy Hunt to allocate more funding in the coming months.

　　GPUs are a key component in building artificial intelligence systems like ChatGPT,the latest version of which was trained using as many as 25,000 Nvidia chips.

　　Sunak outlined plans for the UK to become an AI superpower,but the UK lags badly behind the US and Europe in terms of the computing resources needed to train,test and operate complex models.

　　A government review published this year criticized the UK for its lack of"dedicated AI computing resources",with fewer than 1,000 high-end chips at the disposal of researchers.The report recommends at least 3,000"top-spec"GPUs be available as soon as possible.

　　In March,Hunt agreed to set aside 900 million pounds($1.15 billion)to buy computing resources,although most of the money is expected to go to research and development of conventional supercomputers.

　　A little more than 50 million pounds($63.7 million)is believed to be allocated to AI resources,but that amount is expected to rise to 7,000 as the world scrambles for AI chips(approximately between$89 million and$130 million).10,000 to 100 million pounds(approximately 89 to 130 million U.S.dollars).

　　British officials are likely to press the government to reveal more funding in its autumn budget statement,likely to be released during the AI Security Summit in November.