UKRI-5244 Next National Supercomputing Service

Following further consideration of UKRI's requirements and recent government guidance concerning national security considerations, UKRI has determined that the proposed contract constitutes an exempted contract under paragraph 25 of Schedule 2 to the Procurement Act 2023. Accordingly, UKRI will not be proceeding with the procurement process contemplated during the preliminary market engagement, and no further procurement activity under the Procurement Act 2023 will be undertaken in relation to this requirement. The information set out in the remainder of this notice should therefore be disregarded.
The purpose of this Preliminary Market Engagement Notice is to inform the market that UKRI will soon be tendering the Supercomputing hardware for the Next National Supercomputing Service based at the University of Edinburgh and to also arrange pre-market engagement meetings with vendors attending SC25.
The UK Compute Roadmap (July 2025) https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/uk-compute-roadmap/uk-compute-roadmap sets out the vision for "a world-class compute ecosystem that provides a platform for innovation, growth and opportunity across the economy." This includes the investment of "up to £750 million for a new national supercomputer service in Edinburgh" as announced by government at the June 2025 spending review. The Next National Supercomputing Service (NNSS) will provide a compute infrastructure for the UK's research and innovation communities to utilise cutting-edge modelling, simulation and AI workflows: a key component of the UK government's ambition. The current estimated budget for the Supercomputing System is in the range of £300m - £330m(including VAT).
The supercomputer will be an owned asset of UKRI with the hosting service provision responsibilities undertaken by Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (wholly owned by Edinburgh University).
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