UT Eclipses 5,000 GPUs To Increase Dominance in Open-Source AI, Strengthen Nation’s Computing Power

Amid the private sector's race to lead artificial intelligence innovation, The University of Texas at Austin has strengthened its lead in academic computing power and dominance in computing power for public, open-source AI. UT has acquired high-performance Dell PowerEdge servers and NVIDIA AI infrastructure powered by more than 4,000 NVIDIA Blackwell architecture graphic processing units (GPUs), the most powerful GPUs in production to date.

The new infrastructure is a game-changer for the University, expanding its research and development capabilities in agentic and generative AI while opening the door to more society-changing discoveries that support America's technological dominance. The NVIDIA GB200 systems and NVIDIA Vera CPU servers will be installed as part of Horizon, the largest academic supercomputer in the nation, which goes online next year at UT's Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). The National Science Foundation (NSF) is funding Horizon through its Leadership Class Computing Facility program to revolutionize U.S. computational research.

UT has the most AI computing power in academia. In total, the University has amassed more than 5,000 advanced NVIDIA GPUs across its academic and research facilities. The University has the computing power to produce open-source large language models - which power most modern AI applications - that rival any other public institution. Open-source computing is nonproprietary and serves as the backbone for publicly driven research. Unlike private sector models, it can be fine-tuned to support research in the public interest, producing discoveries that offer profound benefits to society in such areas as health care, drug development, materials and national security.

"As a leading public flagship university, our greatest responsibility is to benefit society and support our state and nation through our teaching and research activities," said UT President Jim Davis. "UT's combination of computing power, facilities and breadth of research expertise is unrivaled, and it positions us at the forefront of life-changing discoveries that also bolster our country's economic and national security. I am grateful for the world-class expertise of our faculty, our partnerships with Dell Technologies, NSF and NVIDIA, and the strategic investment we receive from the State of Texas."

The Texas Legislature recently appropriated $20 million to pay for a portion of the AI infrastructure.

With its immense computational power and research expertise, UT is a national leader in virtually all of the emerging technologies identified by the White House Office of Management and Budget in September as research and development priorities to "ensure unrivaled American leadership." Those areas include artificial intelligence, quantum information science, semiconductors and microelectronics, future computing technologies, and advanced manufacturing.

TACC provides researchers globally with access to a wide range of computational resources to advance discovery that has great societal impact. When Horizon comes online, it will be 10 times as powerful as Frontera, the current leading academic supercomputer that is also operated by TACC.

"Our work with Dell Technologies and NVIDIA gives Horizon groundbreaking capabilities, particularly in the use of AI for scientific innovation," said Dan Stanzione, director of TACC and associate vice president for research at UT. "Our previous large-scale systems have enabled the work of more than 100,000 students and researchers, leading to countless discoveries ranging from subtle changes in building codes to increased resilience in hurricanes, to Nobel Prize-winning research that advances our understanding of the universe. We expect Horizon will continue that tradition."

More than 1,000 of the advanced GPUs will be dedicated to UT's Center for Generative AI, reserved for UT faculty members and student researchers whose work requires hundreds of GPUs working in parallel on massive datasets. The additional GPUs will nearly double the center's capacity and ensure that UT researchers have state-of-the-art computing power and frequency of access unrivaled in academia.

"This is a next-level system designed for large-scale generative AI and computing that is an important first for a university campus," said Adam Klivans, UT computer science professor and director of the UT-led NSF Institute for Foundations of Machine Learning. "The new clusters will increase our researchers' access to accelerated computing and position UT as the academic leader in building large AI models."

The center's GPU cluster makes UT one of the few places where large models can be trained for specific applications and released publicly, critical to ensuring a model's output is trustworthy and interpretable.

"Powered by NVIDIA's accelerated computing platform, Horizon combines the massive parallelism of our GPUs with high-performance networking and energy-efficient architectures to deliver transformative scale for AI and simulation," said Ian Buck, vice president of NVIDIA's hyperscale and high-performance computing business. "The system will enable U.S. researchers to model the planet's climate, advance biomedical discovery, and unlock insights across physics, energy and beyond - pushing the boundaries of what's possible in science through AI-driven computing."

"Our long-standing collaboration with TACC reflects Dell Technologies' commitment to advancing the frontiers of research and innovation," said Arun Narayanan, senior vice president, Compute and Networking, Dell Technologies. "By equipping institutions like TACC with cutting-edge AI infrastructure, including Dell PowerEdge servers with NVIDIA GPUs, we're enabling groundbreaking discoveries today and empowering the next generation of researchers to tackle society's most pressing challenges. Together, we're building a foundation for transformative advancements that will shape the future, all from the heart of Texas."

Horizon is currently under construction in partnership with the NSF, Dell Technologies, which supplies the AI infrastructure, NVIDIA, and Sabey Data Centers in Round Rock, Texas.