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Infrastructure & Compute Vote

Sovereign AI Awards 2026 · People's Vote

Infrastructure & Compute Award

Progress on the foundations Britain needs: compute, chips, cloud, energy or connectivity. Our judges have shortlisted two finalists. Read about each one, then cast your vote.

01Meet the finalists 02Cast your vote 03Watch the live results
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The finalists

Finalists are listed in alphabetical order.

Isambard-AI

Bristol Centre for Supercomputing, University of Bristol

Nominated by Lennard Lee, University of Oxford

Isambard-AI is the UK's national AI supercomputer, delivered by the University of Bristol's Bristol Centre for Supercomputing with HPE and NVIDIA as part of the Government's AI Research Resource. Its 5,448 NVIDIA superchips make it the UK's most powerful supercomputer, and it went from announcement to full national service in under two years.

In its first year it served more than 4,000 users and around 1,000 projects in health, climate, language and AI safety, from personalised cancer vaccine research to AI models for Welsh, Scottish Gaelic and Cornish. Every call for access has been oversubscribed.

Judges' analysis

The judges saw Isambard-AI as a step change in the UK's national AI capacity: publicly owned, free at the point of use for eligible researchers and run on an open software stack. It offered the strongest evidence in the category.

Locai Labs

Locai One

Nominated by James Drayson, Locai Labs

Locai Labs has built Locai One, a range of UK-designed AI computers that put advanced AI capacity directly inside organisations. Each unit combines hardware, its own operating system and AI models, can be installed in 15 minutes and can run completely disconnected from the internet.

Manufactured in Bolton with Scan Computers, Locai One runs from standard mains power and needs no water. It is deployed with the UK Government and First Light Fusion, and each unit can support around 150 developers or more than 3,000 chat users.

Judges' analysis

The judges recognised a distinctive answer to grid and data-centre constraints: a distributed layer of sovereign AI capacity that organisations own and control. UK design and assembly, and the ability to run fully offline, give real independence from foreign cloud services.

Live results

Votes so far. Results are updated regularly while voting is open.

Isambard-AI
0
Locai Labs
0
0 votes castLast updated: awaiting first votes

Cast your vote

Choose one finalist and tell us who you are.

You can vote once in this category, and you are welcome to vote in every category. If the same email address votes more than once in a category, only the most recent vote is counted. The People's Vote runs alongside the independent judging panel's assessment.