Focus group: is UK data centre infrastructure ready for next-generation compute?

Please email Ella.Shuter@techuk.org to express your interest in attending, outlining what angle your organisation could bring to the discussion.

Event overview

Moore's Law is running out of road. The next gains in computing performance will not come from smaller transistors alone, but from new materials, novel architectures, and convergence with photonics, quantum and neuromorphic technologies. This is the post-silicon era, and this session asks how the UK's data centre infrastructure could prepare for what is coming.

The AI Hardware Plan, and its £120m Innovation Programme, is supporting UK firms to develop novel chip architectures and bring new forms of compute closer to deployment. As this ecosystem develops, the infrastructure around it needs to be ready to support and scale these technologies.

Data centres are where that shift becomes concrete. A chip breakthrough stays in the lab until it can be housed, powered, cooled and integrated at scale, and post-silicon chips bring different power draw and thermal profiles to today's GPUs.

Building on techUK's Digital Infrastructure report, this session looks at how heterogeneous computing systems could reshape infrastructure requirements over the next decade. It brings together a small group of chip makers, chip designers, data centre operators and hyperscalers to explore the practical implications and existing bottlenecks, and to work through what the UK needs to do now to get its data centre infrastructure ready for post-silicon chips.

We will be asking:

• What new applications and use cases will the next wave of chip architectures unlock, and what infrastructure will enable them?

• What early signals from chip makers (power specs, interconnect requirements, form factors) should operators be designing against now, years before deployment at scale?

• Is today's GPU-optimised infrastructure locking out flexibility for what comes next?

• What is upgradable in existing facilities, and what has to be built from scratch?

Who should attend

This is a closed-door session. Numbers will be kept deliberately small so every voice in the room shapes the conversation, and techUK will use the discussion to directly inform policy engagement on infrastructure planning for the next generation of compute. Please email Ella.Shuter@techuk.org to express your interest in attending, outlining what angle your organisation could bring to the discussion.