Back to News

ARIA joins CommonAI to launch Scaling Inference Lab, a £50 million investment to strengthen the UK's AI infrastructure

• ARIA is backing the Scaling Inference Lab with £50 million, providing a neutral, open testbed where new hardware and systems can be validated in real environments. The lab addresses a key bottleneck for startups and research groups, and unlocks a shop window for emerging technologies to demonstrate real performance.

“To lead in AI, the UK must lead in the silicon and systems that power it. ARIA's Scaling Inference Lab is exactly the catalyst we need to break open the hardware ecosystem, drive innovation, and ensure the UK is building the physical foundation of the AI revolution.”

- Nick McKeown, Professor Emeritus, Stanford University and Visiting Professor of Engineering, University of Oxford

• Delivered by CommonAI CIC, a new rack-level AI system will be built every 6 months as a “structured pilot”, each one incorporating an unproven technology - such as accelerators, memory, or interconnects.
• The goal is to make it easier for startups to insert new technologies into deployable systems, benchmarking full system-level performance against existing commercial offerings to rapidly reduce the cost of large AI systems and strengthen the UK's position in the AI market.

To find out more about the Lab - including its inaugural partners - see here.