British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak plans to spend 100 million pounds ($130 million) to buy thousands of high-performance artificial intelligence chips, according to reports. 

It is reported that British government officials have been in discussions with IT giants such as Nvidia, AMD and Intel to purchase chips for the so-called "national artificial intelligence research resources". The work, led by science funding body UK Research and Innovation, is believed to be in advanced stages of negotiations with Nvidia. The UK will purchase 5,000 GPUs from Nvidia.

People familiar with the matter said £100m had already been disbursed and officials were pressing Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt to allocate more in the coming months.

Sunak outlined plans for the UK to become an AI superpower, but the UK lags badly behind the US and Europe in terms of the computing resources needed to train, test and operate complex models.

The British "Financial Times" once reported that Saudi Arabia has purchased at least 3,000 Nvidia H100 chips at a price of about US$40,000 each; technology giants such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are also competing to obtain tens of thousands of needed chips. Separately, Nvidia reports that it expects to ship 550,000 of its latest H100 GPUs worldwide in 2023. Demand for GPUs is clearly coming from the generative AI boom, but the HPC market is also vying for these accelerators.

The British "Daily Telegraph" pointed out that "it is not clear what type of chips the UK is negotiating to buy."