AMD and the Department of Energy announced a $1 billion AI supercomputer partnership

AMD has struck a $1 billion deal with the US Department of Energy to develop two supercomputers, Lux and Discovery, in collaboration with Oracle and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). Both supercomputers will live at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Lux is scheduled to come online fairly soon in early 2026, with Discovery to follow in 2029.

Both depend on the work that has been done Frontier supercomputerwhich was also located at ORNL and was the fastest in the world until then Captain It was published online last year at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. AMD has also helped develop supercomputers, so this isn’t the first time it’s worked with the US government on a project like this.

A press release Announcing the partnership describes Lux as an “AI factory,” saying:

Lux at ORNL is the nation’s first dedicated AI factory for science, energy, and national security—designed specifically to train, fine-tune, and deploy fundamental AI models that will accelerate discovery and engineering innovation. Lux is designed to accelerate AI-driven science with its advanced architecture, optimized for data-intensive, model-driven workloads.

Meanwhile, Discovery is described as having an “ubiquitous bandwidth” design that improves on the performance and power efficiency offered by the Frontier supercomputer, delivering more computing output at a similar cost. This processing power will support scientific research in a variety of fields, as the press release explains:

The discovery will lead to breakthroughs in energy, biology, advanced materials, national security and manufacturing innovation. It will help design next-generation reactors, batteries, catalysts, semiconductors and biomaterials.