NVIDIA says it will donate access to computing power it values at $250 million over the next five years to British researchers working on the safety and security of AI agents, AI that can carry out tasks on its own, such as using apps and websites, instead of only answering questions. The chipmaker says the donation works out to $50 million in computing access each year.
Most of it is meant for the wider UK research community working on AI safety and security, NVIDIA says. A share is set aside for work with three groups: BOLD, a lab led by the University of Oxford that is developing ways for AI systems to learn, adapt and work alongside people; SOFAIR, a lab led by UCL that is exploring new open source AI designs, free for anyone to use, study, change and share; and Imperial College London, whose work will include safety engineering and robotics.
NVIDIA says it will pay for the computing time through cloud companies in Britain that it works with, with the machines kept in the country. NVIDIA says the research will focus on secure agents, the security of AI models that are released openly and ways to guard against threats in the real world, and some of the work will use two of NVIDIA's own tools: OpenShell, which NVIDIA describes as open, secure software for running AI programs, and a design called Sentry. "AI capability and safety must advance together," said Jensen Huang, NVIDIA's chief executive.
Britain's AI minister, Kanishka Narayan, called the donation "a vote of confidence" in Britain's AI research. Britain has no major AI developer of its own but wants a leading role in testing and managing the risks of AI, partly through its government-backed AI Security Institute, according to a news report. The same report says scrutiny of AI safety has grown since developers including Anthropic and OpenAI disclosed cases of AI agents behaving in ways they were not meant to.
The $250 million is NVIDIA's own valuation of the computing access, not cash. NVIDIA says which cloud providers will supply it, how the system will be built and the commercial terms are still to be agreed, and it has not said how researchers outside the three named groups will apply or who will decide which projects get the computing time.