A new $10 million Intel-powered supercomputer is set to be built at Imperial College London.

Comprising of Lenovo servers containing the Intel Xeon 6 processors with P-cores, the HX2 supercomputer will be deployed later this year.

First launched in February 2025, Intel said the sixth-generation processors support the “broadest set” of data center and network workloads, delivering up to 1.5x better performance in AI inference on chip while using one-third fewer cores, in addition to providing a “substantial” performance-per-watt efficiency when compared to their predecessors.

The system will be housed in an unnamed co-location data center in London and will be the first academic deployment of Lenovo’s ThinkSystem SC750 V4 Neptune servers in the UK. HX2 will be available as part of Imperial College London’s central Research Computing Service and will support research across sectors including engineering, natural sciences, medicine, and business.

In a statement, Intel said the HX2 solution will deliver significantly greater compute density and energy efficiency than traditional air-cooled systems. No information about the anticipated compute power of the supercomputer has been released, or how many Intel processors will be deployed. DCD has reached out to Intel for more information.

“This is a great win for Intel due in part to Xeon 6’s strong performance for bandwidth-bound AI and HPC workloads,” said Karin Eibschitz Segal, corporate VP and interim GM of the data center group, Intel.

“The deployment of the HX2 supercomputer at Imperial College London marks a significant milestone in our commitment to advancing scientific research and promoting sustainability. We are proud to help tackle global challenges like climate and healthcare, all while lowering the total cost of ownership and environmental impact.”

Kelly Zhang, lecturer in Statistics in the Department of Mathematics at Imperial, added: “My research group is using both CPUs and GPUs for jobs for developing decision-making algorithms for healthcare settings. Specifically, many are working with the ICU electronic health record dataset MIMIC. I’m excited to see what HX2 can offer for my group’s workloads. Having such a powerful yet sustainable cluster is such a privilege.”

In 2023, Imperial College London partnered with Lenovo and Intel for the ICICLE (Imperial College Intel Corporation Lenovo) initiative. It was established to support access to a range of long-term research, emerging technology, and gender balance programs to “help nurture the next generation of researchers and prepare Imperial’s student population for the tremendous opportunities in the HPC and AI spaces.”

The HX2 system was designed as part of the ICICLE collaboration.