AIRR Compute Opportunity: AI for Science call also opens today (Friday 21st November 2025).
The UK Government’s new AI for Science Strategy sets out an ambitious vision to harness artificial intelligence as a transformative tool across the research landscape. Central to this ambition is the development of high-quality, AI-ready datasets and the acceleration of discovery in critical scientific domains. Within this context, the Henry Royce Institute will play a pivotal role.
As the UK’s National Institute for advanced materials research and innovation, Royce will work with the wider community to contribute to the data-driven revolution in materials science. This new Strategy highlights a new initiative with Royce to curate, standardise and centralise advanced materials datasets of high quality, ensuring they are accessible and optimised for AI applications. This will bolster our initial efforts this area: the Royce Digital Materials Foundry, launched May 2025.
Royce will help lay the infrastructure needed to apply modern AI methods, from generative models to automated design loops, to materials discovery and optimisation.
The strategy also recognises advanced materials as one of the scientific areas with the greatest potential for AI-enabled breakthroughs. From developing new sustainable materials to accelerating the transition to clean energy technologies, advances in the field underpin progress across manufacturing, healthcare, electronics and security. Embedding AI into materials research will dramatically shorten development cycles, enhance predictive understanding and improve the reproducibility of complex experiments.
Professor David Knowles FREng, CEO of the Henry Royce Institute, said:
“We’re delighted to be working with DSIT on this transformative initiative. Creating high-quality, AI-ready materials data is essential to unlocking faster, more efficient discovery across materials science. By centralising, standardising and also opening up this information we’re laying the foundations for a step-change in how the UK develops new materials. This collaboration is great news for the wider materials research community, supporting an exciting new era where AI accelerates innovation from laboratory insights to real-world impact.”
In the Strategy Foreword, The Minister for AI and Online Safety Kanishka Narayan MP, and the Minister for Science, Innovation, Research and Nuclear Lord Patrick Vallance jointly stated that the AI for science vision is centred around: developing a data landscape that facilitates transformative research; ensuring the right researchers have access to compute resource at sufficient scale; building research communities made up of truly interdisciplinary teams; and ensuring we capitalise on rapid developments in autonomous laboratory infrastructure and general-purpose and specialist AI science tools.
Together, the Henry Royce Institute and the UK’s materials community are positioned at the forefront of this national effort and helping to ensure that the UK remains a global leader in AI-driven scientific innovation. These commitments also align with the Materials 4.0 vision set out in the Royce facilitated National Materials Innovation Strategy, which calls for fully digitised, data-rich and AI-enabled materials discovery and manufacturing across the UK.
This important new Strategy is part of a major package of new reforms and investment designed to put AI “at the heart of government’s mission to drive growth, create jobs and spread prosperity across the country.”
AIRR Compute Opportunity: AI for Science
DSIT has also launched the AIRR Compute Opportunity, offering 200,000–1,000,000 GPU hours to accelerate cutting-edge AI research across areas like engineering biology, frontier physics, materials science, medical research and quantum technologies. If you’re working at the intersection of AI and scientific discovery especially on models, simulations, or autonomous discovery systems this is a chance to access national-scale compute.
Deadline: 21 December 2025
Open to UK-based universities, research organisations, charities, and registered businesses.
