The UK's Department for Science, Innovation, and Technology (DSIT) has commenced a preliminary market engagement to procure cloud capacity to expand the nation's AI capabilities.

As reported by The Register and detailed in an engagement notice, the ultimate contract awarded could be worth up to £250 million ($330.48m) over four years.

Through the contract, DSIT aims to expand its existing compute capacity for the "AI Research Resource" (AIRR), which is currently supported by AIRR's two supercomputers: Isambard-AI and the University of Bristol, and Dawn at the University of Cambridge.

The cloud provider's capacity will need to "seamlessly integrate" with the AIRRPortal, which is currently used to access AI capacity. This could be through a multi-cloud provider model or provided directly.

DSIT details three goals for the procurement: to help expand the country's AI capacity twentyfold by 2030, to ensure that AIRR users have timely access to the "most advanced hardware," and to provide the necessary facilities to "accelerate innovation and deliver transformative solutions in critical domains such as climate science, energy, medicine, and advanced materials."

In addition to providing access to additional GPU capacity, DSIT requires a " managed service that will include secure data storage, orchestration for machine learning workloads, usage monitoring, reporting, demand forecasting, and active security management."

Currently, DSIT is estimating that the contract will run from May 2026 to March 2030. Interested parties have until January 15, 2026, to register their interest.

The UK's Isambard-AI launched in July 2025. A 5MW, £225 million ($296m) supercomputer, it was built by HPE in partnership with Nvidia and the University of Bristol. It boasts 23 exaflops of AI performance (278 petaflops peak linpack) and ranked 11th on the most recent edition of the Top500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.

Dawn, meanwhile, falls at number 92, with 53.85 petaflops peak linpack. DCD visited the Dawn supercomputer in June 2024.