TapTechNews August 3rd news, according to CNBC reports, The UK authorities have shelved a computing infrastructure project worth £1.3 billion (TapTechNews note: currently about 11.938 billion Chinese yuan), meaning a major setback to the ambition of making the UK a world leader in artificial intelligence.
A government spokesperson confirmed that in order to prioritize other financial plans, the government will shelve two major expenditure commitments funded by taxpayers, worth £500 million and £800 million respectively.
The UK promised to provide £500 million last year for AI Research Resource; in addition, it also announced last year to provide £800 million to fund the creation of a next-generation super-scale computer for the University of Edinburgh, which can perform 1 trillion calculations per second.
These measures will enhance the UK's ability to build high-performance infrastructure and enable it to run advanced artificial intelligence models, which require a large amount of power and a large amount of training data.
A spokesperson for the UK Department of Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) said via email:
We are absolutely committed to building technological infrastructure to bring growth and opportunities to the people of the whole UK. Facing a funding gap of billions of pounds, making difficult and necessary spending decisions in all sectors.