STEPHEN Flynn has called out Keir Starmer for a tweet he made about his commitment to AI – despite Labour’s U-turn on funding for a supercomputer at a Scottish university.
We previously told how Labour were warned by the SNP that developing supercomputers in England after axing a pioneering project at the University of Edinburgh would be a “betrayal”.
On Monday, Prime Minister Starmer set out his AI action plan as he aims to boost economic growth – and announced the UK Government’s pledge to increase the UK’s computer capacity 20-fold by 2030, including building a new supercomputer.
Labour previously pulled £800 million in funding from a similar project in Edinburgh just months ago.
Writing on Twitter/X, Starmer said: “My government’s Plan for Change will be turbocharged by AI.”
The SNP’s Westminster leader Flynn replied: “He’s going to be raging when he finds out who cut the funding for an £800m supercomputer project in Edinburgh.”
The university had already spent £31m on the building housing for the exascale supercomputer when funding was announced in October 2023 by the then-Tory government.
The proposed plans for the supercomputer would have made it one of the most powerful machines in the world and it would have been 50 times faster than any current computers in the UK.
SNP MSP for Kirkcaldy David Torrance previously told The National: “Just a few months after coming into office and promising to deliver growth, the UK Labour Government has pulled the plug from the ground-breaking £800m supercomputer project at the University of Edinburgh, undermining Scotland’s world-leading data, AI and tech sector.
“Deciding now to develop this technology elsewhere would be another betrayal from this UK Labour Government towards Scotland.”
