Alan Mak: Why Won’t Labour Fund Britain’s New National Exascale Supercomputer?  

Alan Mak is Shadow Science & Technology Secretary, a former Treasury and Business Minister, and Conservative MP for Havant.

Last month I was in Edinburgh meeting Conservative MSPs to discuss policy ideas and watch Scottish Conservatives Leader Russell Findlay get the better of the SNP at First Minister’s Questions.

A few miles from Holyrood, just outside Edinburgh’s historic centre, sits ARCHER2, the UK’s current National Supercomputing Service. It can do the work of 250,000 laptops joined together.

But, for Britain to stay competitive, ARCHER2 should have been replaced by the end of this year with a new National Exascale Supercomputer that is 50 times more powerful. The humming of new world-class advanced technology should have been heard in Edinburgh in a building not too far from the current ARCHER2 site. Instead, there will be silence.

Why?

Because last summer, within weeks of coming to power in Westminster, Labour cancelled Britain’s new £800 million National Exascale Supercomputer project, even though the previous Conservative Government had fully funded it.

The year before, Edinburgh University had poured £31 million into constructing a new bespoke facility to house the new Exascale Supercomputer – a machine that would deliver more than one exaflop of processing power. Now that facility sits empty, a monument to Labour’s tech failure and lack of ambition.

Across our country, Britain’s scientists, engineers and researchers talk about the countless experiments, tests and simulations that will never happen unless funding is restored. They had expected to use exascale resources to model complex climate patterns, map the human genome at unprecedented resolution, train next-generation artificial intelligence systems and much more. Instead, ARCHER2’s working life has been extended by Labour. But patching up an ageing system simply won’t work – and isn’t good enough for Britain. ARCHER2 lacks the memory, bandwidth, interconnect speed and energy efficiency required for today’s toughest workloads – and for us to stay competitive in the future.

Since Labour’s cancellation, Peter Kyle and his Department, our supposed champions of innovation, have offered nothing but meaningless platitudes and vague assurances of a “compute strategy” yet to be funded or even formally drafted. Rather than championing the very technologies that create wealth, deliver scientific breakthroughs and drive economic growth, this Labour Government is hell-bent on denying our researchers and tech businesses access to world-class computing power.

Meanwhile, our competitors are racing ahead. The US, Japan and China are all investing heavily in exascale. Even Finland, a country whose economy is roughly eleven times smaller than the UK’s, has already built LUMI, one of Europe’s fastest, greenest supercomputers. That machine went into service in 2022 and has since enabled Finnish researchers to tackle climate simulations, AI training, and advanced materials design, all powered by 100 per cent renewable energy. But Finland is not stopping there. They are now working towards developing their own exascale system.

Germany, too, is on the verge of exascale. Their JUPITER supercomputer, with a €500 million investment, will be Europe’s first true exascale system. It’s first components are already operational, and the Germans could announce their machine has reached full exascale in the same week that Rachel Reeves stands up to give her Spending Review speech. Contrast this with Labour’s empty pledges on exascale: no timelines, no budgets, no contracts – and no ambition for Britain.

Even if Reeves and Kyle U-turn and announce the funding at tomorrow’s Spending Review, Britain would not get its exascale computer up and running until 2027 at the earliest. In the meantime, the world’s tech heavyweights will surge ahead while Labour Britain becomes a footnote in the future of digital development.

Of course, delivering exascale for Britain isn’t merely about bragging rights.

There are serious national security implications too. Modern defence and intelligence agencies rely on supercomputers to run real-time simulations of cyber-attacks, model the resilience of critical infrastructure, and analyse vast data streams for emerging threats. A public exascale system, built to government-grade standards of resilience, provides secure sovereign computing capacity that no private cloud can match. Without it, we cede critical capabilities to others. Rogue states and near-peer adversaries are already fielding exascale resources. We cannot risk falling further behind.

Beyond national security, there is also a direct link between ambitious public investment in cutting-edge science and long-term economic growth. Look at Singapore: government-backed research hubs, data centres and AI testbeds have helped drive GDP growth north of 4% each year for much of the last decade. Singapore’s success shows how strategic funding in science and technology with a light-touch regulatory environment catalyses private R&D, attracts multinational tech and science businesses, and creates high-skilled jobs. Yet here, Labour Ministers believe that fiddling at the edges and eking out more years from ageing machines is enough to support our AI start-ups, biotech firms and advanced materials companies. It isn’t. Innovation demands exascale power, not patches.

Labour Ministers face a stark choice at tomorrow’s Spending Review. They can commit the funding to restore the Edinburgh exascale project, or they can watch Britain’s global standing erode further. Restoring this funding sends an unambiguous signal to the world: we believe in British innovation and we are willing to invest in the future.

The benefits of doing so are immediate and manifold. Edinburgh University can re-embark on procurement straight away, exascale vendors can lock-in contracts, and research groups can plan for an exascale system they can use for cutting-edge innovation. Thousands of skilled jobs, from computer engineers to AI application developers, can be created across the UK. Private sector co-investment will follow, buoyed by clear government commitment. Above all, our universities and tech businesses will regain the computing capacity they need to stay competitive.

So, to the Chancellor and Technology Secretary, I say: do not let bureaucracy or misplaced dogmatic aversion to implementing a Conservative policy prevent Britain from benefitting from exascale technology. Edinburgh University, so central to our computing heritage, has already invested significantly – and Labour should not let them down. Professor Mark Parsons, who runs High Performance Computing at the University, and who I met on my visit (pictured above), deserves clarity and support so he can make exascale available to researchers across the country.

By reinstating the funding for exascale, the Government can declare that Britain remains open for business, that we value our research community, and that we refuse to relinquish our hard-won technological leadership.

Let us not look back in a decade and wonder how we lost the exascale race to nations with smaller economies and fewer resources but bigger ambitions and better governments.

Tomorrow, Labour must make the right choice in the national interest.