AMD has signed 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 be located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Lux is scheduled to come online soon in early 2026, with Discovery following in 2029.
Both are based on work that went into the Frontier supercomputer, which is also located at ORNL and was until now the fastest in the world. El Capitan Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory came online last year. AMD also helped develop those supercomputers, so it’s not the first time it’s working with the US government on a project like this.
A Press release Announcing the partnership, Lux described itself as an “AI factory”:
LX 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-powered 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 the performance and energy efficiency of Frontier supercomputers, delivering more computing output at the same cost. As explained in the press release, that processing power will support scientific research in a variety of areas:
Discovery will lead to breakthroughs in energy, life sciences, advanced materials, national security and manufacturing innovation. This will help in designing next generation reactors, batteries, catalysts, semiconductors and critical materials.
