AMD, Department of Energy announce $1 billion AI supercomputer partnership

AMD has sealed 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 slated to come online fairly soon in early 2026, with Discovery following in 2029.

Both build on the work that went into the Frontier supercomputer, which is also housed at ORNL and was the fastest in the world until El Capitan came online last year at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. AMD also helped develop those supercomputers, so this isn’t its first time working with the US government on a project like this.

A press release announcing the partnership describes Lux as an “AI Factory,” stating:

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

Meanwhile, Discovery is described as having a “Bandwidth Everywhere” design that improves on the performance and energy efficiency the Frontier supercomputer offers, delivering more computing output at a similar cost. That processing power will support scientific research in a variety of areas, as the press release explains:

Discovery will drive breakthroughs in energy, biology, advanced materials, national security, and manufacturing innovation. It will help design next-generation reactors, batteries, catalysts, semiconductors, and critical materials.