AMD has signed a $1 billion deal with the Department of Energy (DOE) to develop two supercomputers called Lux and Discovery, in collaboration with Oracle and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE).
These supercomputers will tackle large scientific problems ranging from nuclear power to cancer treatments to national security, according to Energy Secretary Chris Wright and AMD CEO Lisa Su told Reuters.
Wright said that the systems would “supercharge” advances in nuclear power and fusion energy, technologies for defense and national security, and the development of drugs. Scientists and companies are trying to replicate fusion, the reaction that fuels the sun, by jamming light atoms in a plasma gas under intense heat and pressure to release massive amounts of energy. “We’ve made great progress, but plasmas are unstable, and we need to recreate the center of the sun on Earth,” Wright told Reuters.
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Wright also added, “We’re going to get just massively faster progress using the computation from these AI systems that I believe will have practical pathways to harness fusion energy in the next two or three years.”
Wright said the supercomputers would also help manage the U.S. arsenal of nuclear weapons and accelerate drug discovery by simulating ways to treat cancer down to the molecular level. “My hope is in the next five or eight years, we will turn most cancers, many of which today are ultimate death sentences, into manageable conditions.”
Lux is expected to be constructed, and to come online within six months. It will be based around AMD’s MI355X artificial intelligence chips, and the design will also include central processors (CPUs) and networking chips made by AMD. The system is co-developed by AMD, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).
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Su said that the Lux deployment was the fastest deployment of this size of computer that she has seen. “This is the speed and agility that we wanted to (do) this for the U.S. AI efforts,” Su said.
ORNL Director Stephen Streiffer said the Lux supercomputer will deliver about three times the AI capacity of current supercomputers.
The second supercomputer, Discovery, will be based around AMD’s MI430 series of AI chips that are tuned for high-performance computing. The system will be designed by ORNL, HPE and AMD. Discovery is expected to be delivered in 2028 and be ready for operations in 2029.
A DOE official said the department will host the computers, while the companies will provide the machines and capital spending, and both sides will share the computing power. The official also said the two supercomputers based on AMD chips are intended to be the first of many of these types of partnerships with private industry and DOE labs across the country.