Pledged funding for a next-generation supercomputer and other AI projects has been cancelled to save £1.3 billion, the government confirmed on Friday.
Officials said no funding had been allocated when the Conservatives made the commitment last year.
The Labour government said it’s making “difficult and necessary spending decisions” across Whitehall to balance the books and will set out its own plan for building AI infrastructure needed in the UK.
Andrew Griffith, the shadow science secretary, criticised Labour, saying it has “lower ambitions for UK tech sector.”
The now-cancelled supercomputer would have been the UK’s first exascale supercomputer, which can make a quadrillion calculations each second, the equivalent of 5 million laptops.
It would have been “50 times more powerful than our current top-end system,” the Tory government said in October 2023 when it named the University of Edinburgh as its preferred home.
Hailing the plan at the time, UK Research and Innovation Chief Executive Dame Ottoline Leyser said the “state-of-the-art compute infrastructure is critical to unlock advances in research and innovation, with diverse applications from drug design through to energy security and extreme weather modelling, benefiting communities across the UK.”
It was part of AI funding pledges of around £1.5 billion to £1.6 billion, made by the Tory government in its spring and autumn budgets last year.
‘Difficult and Necessary’
The exascale programme, which was expected to cost £800 million, and a further £500 million funding for AI research, will no longer be taken forward.The government said there was no new funding allocated for the programmes in the previous government’s spending plans.
A spokesperson for the Department for Science, Innovation, and Technology told The Epoch Times via email: “We are absolutely committed to building technology infrastructure that delivers growth and opportunity for people across the UK.
“The government is taking difficult and necessary spending decisions across all departments in the face of billions of pounds of unfunded commitments. This is essential to restore economic stability and deliver our national mission for growth.
“We have launched the AI Opportunities Action Plan which will identify how we can bolster our compute infrastructure to better suit our needs and consider how AI and other emerging technologies can best support our new Industrial Strategy.”
Following the revelations, Sir Peter Mathieson, principal and vice-chancellor at the University of Edinburgh, has been urgently seeking to meet Science Secretary Peter Kyle.
In an email to The Epoch Times, a spokesperson said the university “has led the way in supercomputing within the UK for decades, and is ready to work with the government to support the next phase of this technology in the UK, in order to unlock its benefits for industry, public services. and society.”
Reacting to the policy change, the shadow science secretary sought to reject the suggestion that the Tories made unfunded pledges.
“As a point of fact, at the time the election was called, ministers had been advised by officials that the department was likely to underspend its budget for the current financial year,” Griffith said in a statement.
In separate comments posted on social media platform X, he said: “If Labour have lower ambitions for UK tech sector—or the new Secretary of State cannot get the same level of support for DSIT from the Chancellor—that’s up to them but no one should be fooled by Labour trying to blame their predecessors.
“We increased public spending on research to a record £20 billion a year for 2024/25 and unlike Labour, we committed to increase that by a further 10% in our manifesto. AI and Exascale compute were both beneficiaries of this increased funding.”
