UK spends £45m on AI supercomputer to tackle fusion energy

TL;DR: The UK government is funding a £45m ($60m) AI supercomputer called Sunrise, set to go live this summer at the Culham campus in Oxfordshire. The machine will run AI-driven plasma simulations and build digital twins of fusion reactors, and forms the first infrastructure in the UK’s planned AI Growth Zone.

Sunrise is pitched as the world’s most powerful AI supercomputer dedicated specifically to fusion energy research. Funded by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, the 1.4MW system will deliver up to 6.76 exaFLOPS of AI-accelerated modelling performance when it begins operating in June.

What it does

Fusion research has long depended on large-scale simulations to understand plasma behaviour and the extreme materials inside experimental reactors. Sunrise combines high-performance computing with physics-informed AI models, allowing researchers to run more detailed simulations and develop digital twins of fusion systems before committing to expensive physical experiments.

The system uses AMD EPYC processors and AMD Instinct GPU accelerators on Dell PowerEdge infrastructure, with WEKA providing storage. Intel, the University of Cambridge, and the UKAEA are also partners.

Dr Rob Akers, UKAEA’s director of computing programmes, described the approach as an “Apollo programme” for fusion development: “Sunrise will bring that capability to fusion by combining high-fidelity simulation with physics-informed AI to develop predictive digital twins that reduce the cost, risk, and time of learning.”

Part of a bigger push

The supercomputer supports several UK fusion initiatives including the LIBRTI programme for tritium fuel-cycle technologies and the STEP project, a prototype spherical tokamak power plant planned for Nottinghamshire in the 2040s. It also follows a separate £36m investment in the Cambridge supercomputing centre confirmed earlier this year.

Looking forward

Whether AI can meaningfully accelerate the famously slow march toward commercial fusion remains an open question. The UK is betting that more computing power and better simulation tools might shorten the timeline, but fusion has a long history of being perpetually 30 years away. Sunrise at least gives researchers better tools to work with.