UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) has issued a preliminary market engagement notice, saying it will soon put out a tender for the UK’s forthcoming Next National Supercomputing Service (NNSS).

In the posting, first reported by The Register, UKRI said it was looking to hear from large-scale supercomputer manufacturers, high-performance storage providers, and supercomputer CPU and GPU manufacturers.

“The Next National Supercomputing Service will provide a compute infrastructure for the UK's research and innovation communities to utilize cutting-edge modelling, simulation, and AI workflows: a key component of the UK government's ambition,” the notice read.

Interested parties are invited to email UKRI, with the body also stating its intention to hold in-person meetings with relevant suppliers during the SC25 (Supercomputing 2025) conference, taking place in St. Louis, Missouri, in November.

In June 2025, the Labour-led UK government recommitted to building a supercomputer at the University of Edinburgh, having initially canceled the Conservative-launched project in August 2024, claiming the plans were unfunded.

When recommitting to the system, the UK government said it had budgeted “up to £750 million ($1 billion) for a new national supercomputer service in Edinburgh.” However, the notice states that only £300-330 million ($400-440m) of that total figure has been earmarked for the system’s hardware.

Edinburgh was selected to host what at the time was dubbed “the UK’s first exascale supercomputer” in 2023, with £800m ($1.06bn) set aside to build a system. Nevertheless, despite U-turning on its decision to scrap the system, details of the supercomputer’s processing power have yet to be revealed, meaning it's unclear if the UK government is still targeting exascale capacity for the system.

No mention of exascale systems is included in the government’s UK Compute Roadmap paper, published in July 2025 and attached to the Preliminary Market Engagement Notice.

Jointly written by the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology (DSIT) and UKRI, the report states that the UK needs to deploy "at least" 6GW of AI-capable data center capacity by 2030 to remain competitive, a threefold increase in the data center capacity available in the UK today.

The contract is slated to run from September 1, 2026, to August 31, 2031, although the notice states there is the possibility of extending the date to 31 August 2033.