News Summary:<\/p>\n
\n\tNVIDIA announces a compute donation valued at $250 million over five years to support U.K. agentic safety and security research.
\n\tThe program will support the wider U.K. research community, with a proportion of the commitment supporting BOLD, SOFAIR and Imperial College London across fundamental agentic foundation models and robotics safety.
\n\tCompute access will be delivered through U.K.-based NVIDIA Cloud Partners, supporting the nation\u2019s research capability and compute ecosystem.
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NVIDIA today announced a five-year compute donation valued at $250 million to strengthen the United Kingdom\u2019s agentic safety and security research capability.<\/p>\n
The commitment will provide $50 million in compute access annually to support agentic safety and security research across the U.K. The majority will support the wider U.K. AI safety and security research community, with a proportion supporting work with the British Open-Ended Learning and Discovery Lab (BOLD), the Science of Fundamental AI Research Lab (SOFAIR) and Imperial College London.<\/p>\n
\u201cAI capability and safety must advance together,\u201d said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. \u201cThe U.K. brings world-class scientific rigor to this essential engineering challenge. With this $250 million commitment, NVIDIA will put accelerated computing in the hands of U.K. researchers to develop, test and strengthen safeguards for increasingly powerful AI. This is how the U.K. turns research leadership into real-world solutions \u2014 and scientific progress into a future that benefits everyone.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThis commitment is a vote of confidence in our world-leading strength and expertise in AI research \u2014 and, in particular, frontier AI safety that is becoming ever more important as AI\u2019s capabilities develop,\u201d said U.K. AI Minister Kanishka Narayan. \u201cNVIDIA\u2019s donation will help Britain\u2019s AI innovators access the resources they need to bring their ideas to life \u2014 and, in the process, help build a distinctly British AI future that is safe, secure and that serves people\u2019s best interests, objectives that will be central to the U.K.\u2019s G20 presidency.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cTo realise the opportunities of AI, people need to feel the technology is safe and secure. The government is committed to ensuring AI can be securely harnessed to fuel new discoveries and drive growth,\u201c said U.K. Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds.\u00a0\u201cNVIDIA\u2019s investment will help British researchers continue to lead the world in that effort \u2014 accelerating the breakthroughs that build trust and help us deploy AI safely.\u201d<\/p>\n
Strengthening UK Leadership in Agentic Safety and Security
\nCompute provided through the initiative will be dedicated to agentic safety and security research.<\/p>\n
The program will connect complementary areas of U.K. research, including in AI safety and security. BOLD, led by the University of Oxford, is developing approaches that help AI systems learn, adapt and operate alongside people. SOFAIR, led by UCL, is exploring new open source AI architectures and more accessible ways to develop and deploy AI. Imperial\u2019s work will include safety engineering and robotics.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are experiencing a critical moment where AI safety as an afterthought is no longer appropriate for the open-ended, evolving world,\u201d said Jakob Foerster, founding director of BOLD. \u201cThis compute will help us explore transparent and human-centric approaches to AI that allow us to collectively rise to the challenge by building in governance and human-AI co-improvement from the ground up.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe next frontier of artificial intelligence is physical \u2014 robots, autonomous systems of agents that perceive, reason and act in the real world,\u201d said Alessandra Russo, director of Imperial Frontier AI Research Lab and convening co-director of Human and AI, School of Convergence Science. \u201cWith NVIDIA and our industry partners, Imperial is working to ensure that safety and assurance at the heart of this revolution, ensuring the U.K. leads not only in developing physical AI but in making it trustworthy for the communities and industries that will depend on it.\u201d<\/p>\n
NVIDIA will fund compute access through U.K.-based NVIDIA Cloud Partners<\/a>, with infrastructure hosted in the U.K. This will support the U.K. compute ecosystem and provide a domestic platform for research. Provider selection, technical architecture and commercial terms are to be agreed.<\/p>\n As part of the wider initiative, research programs will focus on secure agents, open-model security and real-world threat mitigations. The work will support secure sandboxes, reproducible research and safety assessment benchmarks, including research conducted using NVIDIA OpenShell\u2122 open, secure runtime software<\/a> and the NVIDIA Sentry reference design<\/a>. Findings are intended to inform safeguards across the wider computing ecosystem.<\/p>\n