Mater-AI Awarded £2.25M in National Supercomputing Support to Accelerate AI-Driven Materials Discovery

London, UK - Mater-AI has been awarded 500,000 GPU hours on the UK’s Isambard-AI AIRR supercomputer through the highly competitive AI for Science programme led by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT). The allocation represents £2.25 million in national compute support to utilise Isambard-AI, the UK’s most powerful AI supercomputer, ranked in the top 15 of the world’s fastest supercomputers by the prestigious TOP500 list and recognised as one of the greenest by the Green500.

Mater-AI’s project, “Scaling AI-Driven Materials Discovery for High-Performance Thermoelectrics in Clean Energy Applications,” was recognised among the strongest proposals in the national call. The award provides large-scale access to NVIDIA GH200-powered infrastructure hosted by the Bristol Centre for Supercomputing (BriCS), enabling the company to significantly expand the scale and depth of its computational materials research.


The compute allocation will allow Mater-AI to build one of the world’s largest and most internally consistent density functional theory (DFT) datasets focused on inorganic semiconductor materials for electrical and thermal conductivity optimisation. Large-scale, high-quality DFT datasets are critical to training next-generation AI models capable of predicting novel thermoelectric materials with improved efficiency, stability and real-world manufacturability.


Thermoelectric materials convert waste heat into electricity and enable solid-state cooling. Despite decades of research, material performance improvements have progressed incrementally due to the slow and costly nature of traditional discovery methods. Mater-AI integrates AI, physics-based modelling and high-performance computing to compress materials discovery timelines from decades to weeks, accelerating the path from computational prediction to experimental validation.

Access to Isambard-AI strengthens Mater-AI’s position at the forefront of AI-enabled materials innovation in the UK and supports its mission to develop scalable clean energy solutions for applications including data centres, aerospace, defence and advanced industrial systems.

Mater-AI extends its thanks to UKRI, DSIT and the Bristol Centre for Supercomputing (BriCS) team for supporting deep-tech science in the UK and enabling early-stage companies to leverage national infrastructure to accelerate breakthrough innovation.

Over the next six months, Mater-AI will deploy the awarded compute capacity to scale its models, refine its generative pipeline and progress toward lab validation of AI-discovered thermoelectric materials.