Hub Director welcomes UCL’s partnership with NVIDIA
A computer server in the Data Centre at University College London
Technology company NVIDIA last week made a series of announcements, including a partnership with Hub institution UCL. In this blog, Hub Director David Barber welcomes NVIDIA’s commitment to supporting UK universities’ work in AI.
We are delighted with the announcement of UCL as NVIDIA’s partner to help develop sovereign AI platforms. We also congratulate our Hub colleague Pontus Stenetorp for his work on the BritLLM model, which this project will build on.
Furthermore, we are delighted by Jensen Huang's warm words about Britain's AI community during London Tech Week, especially NVIDIA's commitment to significant investments in the UK.
These include the establishment of a new AI lab, a "talent pipeline" initiative for schools and universities, investment in quantum computing capabilities and support for a UK sovereign AI industry forum.
NVIDIA's strong partnerships with UK universities are already yielding impressive results. For instance, the Jade consortium leverages NVIDIA technologies to advance AI development and safety. Here at University College London, researchers are developing a digital twin of the human body, a ground breaking project also made possible by NVIDIA’s technology. Researchers at our Generative AI hub have found NVIDIA's powerful compute capabilities invaluable for their projects.
Alongside these commitments, we welcome the Prime Minister's announcements on artificial intelligence at London Tech Week. We're particularly excited about the 'OpenBind' consortium, which aims to generate the world's largest dataset on drug-protein interactions using breakthrough experimental technology. This aligns perfectly with insights from our Gen Biology workshop last month, where we learned how generative AI models are already accelerating drug discovery and disease fighting.
Our hub is poised to support these initiatives. We are confident that our collective activities and investments will, as Jensen Huang aptly put it, "get the flywheel going" for AI innovation in the UK.
