AMD, US Energy Department sign $1B AI supercomputer pact
AMD and the US Department of Energy have unveiled a public–private deal to deliver two AMD‑accelerated AI supercomputers—Lux and Discovery—at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, targeting faster breakthroughs in energy, security and health research.
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and the US Department of Energy (DOE) have announced a public–private partnership worth more than $1 billion to deliver two AMD‑accelerated artificial‑intelligence supercomputers—“Lux” and “Discovery”—for Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
The partners said the systems are intended to speed breakthroughs across energy, national security and medicine.
Lux is touted to be the USA's first dedicated “AI factory” for science, co‑developed by Oak Ridge, AMD, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
Discovery is positioned as Oak Ridge’s next flagship machine, extending the lab’s leadership in high‑performance computing and AI.
Lux is slated for deployment in early 2026, using AMD Instinct MI355X accelerators alongside AMD Epyc CPUs and Pensando networking.
Discovery is planned to arrive in 2028 with user operations in 2029, built on HPE’s new Cray Supercomputing GX5000 platform and powered by next‑generation AMD Epyc “Venice” CPUs and Instinct MI430X GPUs.
A new public–private model
Under the model outlined, the DOE will host the systems while industry partners provide the machines and capital spending; compute resources have been set to be shared between the government and private collaborators.
Oak Ridge leadership said Lux will deliver roughly three times the AI capacity of current supercomputers, addressing data‑intensive work in areas such as fusion energy, nuclear technologies, materials discovery and cancer research.
Discovery has been designed to push performance and energy efficiency further, with a “bandwidth everywhere” architecture for AI‑for‑science at scale.
The initiative builds on AMD’s role in Frontier—Oak Ridge’s exascale system—and complements El Capitan at Lawrence Livermore. With Lux and Discovery, AMD has continued to expand its footprint in US scientific computing infrastructure.