AMD has signed a $1 billion deal with the U.S. Department of Energy to develop two supercomputers – Lux and Discovery – in partnership with Oracle and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). Both supercomputers will be installed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Lux is expected to come online soon in early 2026 and Discovery in 2029.
Both are based on work put into the Frontier supercomputer, which is also housed at ORNL and was the fastest in the world until Captain was made available online last year at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. AMD also helped develop these supercomputers, so this isn’t the first time it has collaborated with the US government on such a project.
AND press release the partnership announcement describes Lux as an “AI factory”, stating:
Lux at ORNL is the nation’s first artificial intelligence factory dedicated to science, energy and national security – built specifically to train, tune and deploy foundational AI models that accelerate engineering discovery and innovation. Lux is designed to accelerate AI-based learning with an advanced architecture optimized for data-intensive and model-centric workloads.
Meanwhile, Discovery is described as having a “Bandwidth Everywhere” design that improves the performance and energy efficiency of the Frontier supercomputer, providing more computing power at a similar cost. As explained in the press release, this computing power will support scientific research in various areas:
Discovery will lead to breakthroughs in energy, biology, advanced materials, national security and manufacturing innovation. It will assist in the design of next-generation reactors, batteries, catalysts, semiconductors and critical materials.