The SKA Observatory (SKAO) is set to use Amazon Web Services (AWS) for a cloud-based high-performance computing cluster.

As reported by The London Business Journal, the cluster will be set up by UK-based The Server Labs to support the SKAO's development phase.

SKAO is a global effort to create one of the largest radio telescope arrays in the world, and will eventually comprise 197 dish antennas in South Africa and 131,072 dipole antennas in Western Australia.

Once complete and operational, the telescopes are expected to gather and archive some 700 petabytes of data annually.

The compute cluster, based on AWS, will be used during the development phase, as SKAO will need a "flexible computing environment capable of rapidly adapting to different hardware configurations and performance requirements."

The Server Labs will work with SKAO to develop the cluster, which will use AWS Parallel Cluster and enable the development and fine-tuning of "highly complex signal processing algorithms," as astronomical signals - to be extracted in a coherent way -require sophisticated algorithmic processing and extensive iterative testing across different compute architectures. With AWS, the engineers will be able to switch between different instance configurations and therefore hardware, including GPUs and CPUs, and test the performance.

Dolores Saiz, CEO of The Server Labs, said: “The computational demands of next-generation scientific missions require development environments that can evolve as rapidly as the algorithms and requirements themselves.

“We are proud to support the SKAO by designing this environment so their teams has the flexibility to experiment, benchmark, and optimize at scale, ensuring they can make informed decisions during the development lifecycle.”

AWS and SKAO have long been partners. In 2015, the two set up the AstroCompute in the Cloud grant program, which sees AWS credits and up to one petabyte of storage for an AWS Public Data Set provided by SKAO telescopes.

SKAO also has a data center footprint and HPC facilities. In October 2025, it was reported that the data center is located in Murchison, Western Australia, and houses around 100 racks for the array, with the majority of the racks housing servers with FPGAs programmed to filter the data from SKA, so that only the important information is sent to SKA's supercomputers in Perth. The data center reportedly needs two Faraday cages to protect it from leaked radio waves.

In 2021, the Australian government announced it would spend $64.4m on a supercomputer in Perth for SKA. The project also has another supercomputer in Cape Town. In total, the two systems will have at least 250 petaflops of compute.