The U.S. Department of Energy has signed a $1 billion deal with Advanced Micro Systems (AMD) to build two supercomputers with unprecedented power to fuel scientific advances ranging from nuclear energy to the development of cancer treatments.
The partnership, first reported by Reuters will ensure on Monday that the US government has the necessary computing power to process enormous amounts of data – and could deliver about three times the AI capacity of today’s supercomputers. The artificial intelligence-powered supercomputers could be used to advance nuclear energy and mimic fusion – the process that fuels the sun and creates vast amounts of energy.
“We will make tremendously faster progress using the calculations of these AI systems, which I think will have practical capabilities to harness fusion energy in the next two or three years,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright told Reuters.
Shares of AMD rose nearly 1% in afternoon trading on Monday. The semiconductor maker’s shares have more than doubled in value this year, and the company recently partnered to supply its chips to OpenAI to build out its AI infrastructure.
Neither the Department of Energy nor AMD immediately responded to a request for comment from Fast Company.
SUPERCOMPUTER TIMELINES
The coming supercomputers could be used for further advances in defense and national security technologies, including helping the US government manage its arsenal of nuclear weapons, along with accelerating the discovery of drugs to treat cancer, Wright told Reuters. “My hope is that in the next five or eight years we will turn most cancers, many of which today are ultimate death sentences, into manageable conditions.”
The first of two supercomputers, Lux, could be operational within six months and will be based on AMD’s MI355X artificial intelligence chips and the company’s central processors (CPUs) and networking chips. The supercomputer system was co-developed by AMD, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).
The timeline for Lux will mark the fastest deployment of a supercomputer of this size that AMD’s CEO, Lisa Su, has ever seen, she told Reuters. “This is the speed and agility with which we wanted (to do) this for the U.S. AI effort.”
A second, even more advanced supercomputer – Discovery – will have a longer timeline for completion and is expected to be ready for use sometime in 2029.
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