Construction Starts on UK's £750m National Supercomputer Near Edinburgh

Construction work has started on the UK's new national supercomputer, bbc.co.uk reported. The £750m facility will be hosted in University of Edinburgh buildings on the outskirts of Penicuik and Roslin in Midlothian. The project was originally backed by the previous Conservative government but shelved in August 2024 after Labour took power.

Funding was reinstated in June 2025. The supercomputer is scheduled to finish at the end of next year and will operate on the same scale as the JUPITER system completed in Germany last year. Prof Mark Parsons, director of the supercomputer project at the University of Edinburgh, said the machine will be roughly the size of a medium-sized supermarket and contain thousands of processors.

It will perform 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 calculations per second, or 50 times the power of the existing ARCHER2 system at the same site, which ends operations at the end of this year. Surplus heat from the supercomputer will warm university buildings and potentially nearby homes.

Prof Parsons said the system will allow researchers and companies to model processes that are too quick, large or long for laboratory experiments, including quantum effects, earthquakes and the expansion of the universe.

Prof Joe Zuntz, a cosmologist at the University of Edinburgh who works with the Vera C. Rubin telescope in Chile, said the machine will support analysis of data from state-of-the-art telescopes. Kanishka Narayan, the government's minister for online safety and AI, said the project will focus on healthcare and space innovations.