Supply chain / Sovereign and public programmes
UK AI Research Resource (AIRR)
A UK government programme giving researchers, academics and small businesses access to AI supercomputers at Bristol and Cambridge, with application routes that provide compute but no funding.
- Type
- Programme
- Where it sits
- A public, application-based source of GPU time for UK projects.
- Constraint
- Applications must show benefit to the UK, and awarded time must be used within three months of project start (GOV.UK and UKRI pages).
- Maturity
- In use or open for access
What we checked
- GOV.UK lists Isambard-AI at Bristol with 5,448 NVIDIA GH200 chips, and Dawn and Zenith at Cambridge. (source)
- Rapid Access offers UK small and medium businesses up to 20,000 GPU hours, and the Gateway route offers first-time users up to 10,000 GPU hours. (source)
- UKRI shows the Gateway route open with no closing date as of its February 2026 update, with compute only and no funding. (source)
Written by ComputeFinder from public pages on 2 October 2026. Company statements are the company's own, not independently checked, and reported items are marked as such. Not yet reviewed line by line by a second person. If something is wrong, tell us.