The US Department of Energy enters into an ambitious partnership of 1 billion dollars with the technological giant AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) for supercomputers with advanced artificial intelligence, Reuters reports.

The goal, the construction of two supercomputers that will face major scientific problems, such as a solution to the energy problem, innovative medicines, but will also contribute significantly to national security, according to what Energy Secretary Chris Wright and AMD CEO Lisa Sue pointed out to Reuters.

The US is building the two ultra-high-tech electronic systems to ensure the country has enough supercomputers to run increasingly complex experiments that require processing huge amounts of data. Electronic systems can speed up the process of making scientific discoveries in areas where the US is focused.

The US Secretary of Energy stated that the systems will “supercharge” developments in nuclear fusion, technologies for defense and national security, as well as the development of new medicines.

“We’re going to make much faster progress using the computations from these AI systems, which I think will have practical applications for harnessing fusion energy in the next two or three years.” he emphasized.

Wright said supercomputers will also help manage America’s nuclear weapons arsenal and accelerate drug discovery by simulating ways to treat cancer at the molecular level. “My hope is that in the next five or eight years, we will turn most cancers, many of them which today are “death sentences”, in manageable situations’ Wright said.

Plans call for the first computer, dubbed Lux, to be built and operational within the next six months. It will be based on AMD’s MI355X artificial intelligence chips, and the design will also include central processing units (CPUs) and networking chips manufactured by AMD. The system is jointly developed by AMD, Hewlett Packard Enterprises (HPE), Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).

AMD’s Su said the development of Lux was the fastest development of a computer of this size that he has seen.

“This is the speed and agility we wanted to bring to US AI efforts,” AMD’s chief said.

For his part, ORNL director Stephen Streifer emphasized that the Lux supercomputer will provide approx. three times the capacity tintelligence probe of today’s supercomputers.

The second, more advanced computer, called Discovery, will be based on AMD’s MI430 series of artificial intelligence chips, which are tuned for high-performance computing. This system will be designed by ORNL, HPE and AMD. Discovery is expected to be delivered in 2028 and ready for operation in 2029.

Streifer said he expects huge computing gains, but he can’t predict how much more computing power it will have.

The MI430 is a special variant of the MI400 series that combines important features of traditional supercomputer chips along with features for running artificial intelligence applications, said Liz Xu.

The Energy Department will host the computers at its facilities, the companies will provide the machinery and capital costs, and the two sides will share the computing power, an Energy Department official said.

The two supercomputers based on AMD chips they are meant to be the first of many such types of partnerships with private industry and Department of Energy laboratories across the country, the official said.