U.S. Department of Energy and AMD cut a $1 billion deal for two AI supercomputers — pairing has already birthed the two fastest machines on the planet

Tens of billions seem to fly in all sorts of directions these days in the AI world. A "mere" $1 billion deal would arguably not even register, but the one announced today is arguably far more important than all the data centers for enabling AI chatbot sexting. According to a Reuters report, the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) and AMD have announced a partnership for building two supercomputers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) as a foundation for future nuclear fusion and medical research.

The partnership has the DoE and ORNL on the blue corner, and AMD, HPE, and Oracle on the other. The deal is that ORNL will host the datacenters, thus presumably providing the energy to run them, and the private companies will foot the bill for the hardware and software. When built, both sides will share the computing power.

The supercomputers themselves w ill predictably be an all-AMD affair for the major bits of hardware. The first one is called Lux and is set to be functional within six months, with AMD Instinct MI355X accelerators, to the tune of 1400 W board power each. ORNL director Stephen Streiffer says Lux will be three times as powerful in AI over current supercomputers, while Lisa Su states it was the fastest deployment of this size of supercomputer.

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The second supercomputer will be called Discovery and is scheduled for delivery in 2028 and an operational kick-off in 2029. Discovery will use AMD's upcoming Instinct MI430 parts, a design with one Epyc CPU and four MI430X-HPC dies. The 430X and 450X are variations of the same design, with the former focusing on high-precision FP32 and FP64 performance, while the latter goes in the exact opposite direction and bets all its chips on FP8 and FP16.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright says this project will "supercharge" research on multiple fronts and tackle "large scientific problems ranging from nuclear power to cancer treatments to national security". He seems particularly bullish on fusion energy, stating he believes that with the help of these systems, [the U.S.] will have "practical pathways to harness fusion energy in the next two or three years." He also hopes that cancer will become a manageable disease i n a timeframe of five to eight years.

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