The 33-acre site in Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire will bring much-needed compute capacity to businesses, supporting AI innovation and ensuring reliable digital services for Google Cloud customers and general consumers relying on products like Search, Maps, and YouTube.

Ruth Porat, Alphabet’s president and chief financial officer, said the data centre “represents our latest investment in the UK and the wider digital economy.” She added that it builds on previous investments like Saint Giles and Kings Cross offices, a multi-year research deal with Cambridge, and the Grace Hopper subsea cable connecting the UK with the US and Spain.

Porat said the facility will “help meet growing demand for our AI and cloud services and bring crucial compute capacity to businesses across the UK while creating construction and technical jobs for the local community.”

As a pioneer in computing infrastructure, Google runs some of the most efficient data centres in the world and has committed to powering them entirely on carbon-free energy around the clock by 2030.

Last year, Google signed a deal with ENGIE for offshore wind energy from Scotland’s Moray West farm which will provide 100MW of energy and put UK operations on track for 90 percent clean energy by 2025.

The new data centre will recover heat for local homes and businesses while also deploying an air-cooling system.

Porat called the new data centre the “latest in a series of investments that support Brits and the wider economy” and evidence of its “continued commitment to the UK.” Other investments include $1 billion for its Central Saint Giles office space, developing the one million sq ft King’s Cross campus, and an Accessibility Discovery Centre spurring accessible technology.

Beyond offices, data centres, and subsea cables, Google has also provided digital skills training for over a million Brits and expanded its AI-focussed Digital Garage curriculum to capitalise on demand for the technology.  

Google’s announcement follows Microsoft confirming a £2.5 billion data centre in the UK last November after overcoming regulatory hurdles for its £55 billion Activision Blizzard acquisition.

“This is the single largest investment in its 40-year history in the country which will see Microsoft grow its UK AI infrastructure across sites in London and Cardiff and potential expansion into northern England, helping to meet the exploding demand for efficient, scalable, and sustainable AI specific compute power,” explained HM Treasury.

“Data centres process, host, and store the massive amounts of digital information that is critical for developing AI models.”

Microsoft is supplying its UK data centre with more than 20,000 advanced GPUs for machine learning and the development of new AI models.

Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt said: “The UK is the tech hub of Europe with an ecosystem worth more than that of Germany and France combined – and this investment is another vote of confidence in us as a science superpower.”

(Image Credit: Google)

See also: DeepMind AlphaGeometry solves complex geometry problems

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MLPerf consists of five inference benchmarks which cover the main three AI applications today: image classification, object detection, and translation.

“Industry-standard MLPerf benchmarks provide relevant performance data on widely used AI networks and help make informed AI platform buying decisions,” said Rangan Majumder, VP of Search and AI at Microsoft.

Last year, NVIDIA led all five benchmarks for both server and offline data centre scenarios with its Turing GPUs. A dozen companies participated.

23 companies participated in this year’s MLPerf but NVIDIA maintained its lead with the A100 outperforming CPUs by up to 237x in data centre inference.

For perspective, NVIDIA notes that a single NVIDIA DGX A100 system – with eight A100 GPUs – provides the same performance as nearly 1,000 dual-socket CPU servers on some AI applications.

“We’re at a tipping point as every industry seeks better ways to apply AI to offer new services and grow their business,” said Ian Buck, Vice President of Accelerated Computing at NVIDIA.

“The work we’ve done to achieve these results on MLPerf gives companies a new level of AI performance to improve our everyday lives.”

The widespread availability of NVIDIA’s AI platform through every major cloud and data centre infrastructure provider is unlocking huge potential for companies across various industries to improve their operations.

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