UKRI-5244 Next National Supercomputing Service

Following further consideration of UKRI's requirements and recent government guidance concerning national security considerations, UKRI has determined that the proposed contract constitutes an exempted contract under paragraph 25 of Schedule 2 to the Procurement Act 2023. Accordingly, UKRI will not be proceeding with the procurement process contemplated during the preliminary market engagement, and no further procurement activity under the Procurement Act 2023 will be undertaken in relation to this requirement. The information set out in the remainder of this notice should therefore be disregarded.

The purpose of this Preliminary Market Engagement Notice is to inform the market that UKRI will soon be tendering the Supercomputing hardware for the Next National Supercomputing Service based at the University of Edinburgh and to also arrange pre-market engagement meetings with vendors attending SC25.

The UK Compute Roadmap (July 2025) https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/uk-compute-roadmap/uk-compute-roadmap sets out the vision for "a world-class compute ecosystem that provides a platform for innovation, growth and opportunity across the economy." This includes the investment of "up to £750 million for a new national supercomputer service in Edinburgh" as announced by government at the June 2025 spending review. The Next National Supercomputing Service (NNSS) will provide a compute infrastructure for the UK's research and innovation communities to utilise cutting-edge modelling, simulation and AI workflows: a key component of the UK government's ambition. The current estimated budget for the Supercomputing System is in the range of £300m - £330m(including VAT).

The supercomputer will be an owned asset of UKRI with the hosting service provision responsibilities undertaken by Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (wholly owned by Edinburgh University).

The applicability of the Social Value Act (SVA), tackling wider social, economic, and environmental benefits is considered for procurements, and as such, vendors will be expected to comply with UKRI's Responsible Procurement Charter (https://www.ukri.org/publications/responsible-procurement-charter/).

UKRI intends to conduct pre-market engagement events during November 2025.

UKRI's market engagement plan will comprise of the following steps, which are intending to run sequentially with vendors participating in each step as applicable:

Step 1 - Respond to this Notice

UKRI would like to hear from the following vendors:

• Large scale supercomputer manufacturers

• High performance storage providers

• Supercomputer CPU and GPU manufacturers

Please email supercomputer@ukri.org to express an interest in this requirement.

Step 2 - Arranging meetings at SC25 and the Market Engagement Questionnaire

UKRI will arrange meetings at SC25 with relevant suppliers and we will also issue a market engagement questionnaire to these suppliers w/c 20th October 2025.

Step 3 - In-Person Engagement (SC25 Nov 16-21, 2025 - St Louis)

UKRI wishes to arrange face to face pre-market engagement meetings with vendors that are in attendance at SC25 during Nov 17-20, 2025 at St. Louis. UKRI, DSIT and the Supercomputer Procurement Group members will be present at the meetings. Please email to supercomputer@ukri.org using the following title 'UKRI-5244 - SC25 In-person Engagement' to register your interest and provide available meeting options between the 17th -19th November. The duration of these meetings would be up to 2 hours at UKRI's discretion.

Please note that the date relating to the publication of the contract notice is tentative and is subject to approval of the Business Case by the relevant UK Government departments (including Department for Science Innovation and Technology and HM Treasury) All future tender documentation will be made available via UKRI's e-sourcing portal and potential bidders should register on this portal to ensure they have access to all tender documentation when the tender is published.