Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a U.S. Department of Energy facility in East Tennessee, will continue its global leadership in supercomputing by housing two new machines focused on artificial intelligence and energy research in line with the goals of President Donald Trump’s administration.
Lux, a computer designed specifically to develop AI, will be built at record speed thanks to a public-private partnership with chip maker Advanced Micro Devices valued at more than $1 billion, the Department of Energy announced Monday. Lux is scheduled to come online in early 2026.
Discovery, a more traditional project for the lab, will come online in 2028 as the next-generation supercomputer at the Oak Ridge computing facility. Though the lab has not shared specifics about Discovery’s expected speed, history suggests it could be the world’s fastest supercomputer.
The laboratory’s four previous supercomputers — Jaguar (2009), Titan (2012), Summit (2018) and Frontier (2022) — were each the world’s fastest when they debuted. Frontier made history as the world’s first exascale supercomputer, capable of completing more than 1 quintillion calculations per second.
“Discovery is going to be based on technology which currently doesn’t exist,” Matt Sieger, project director for Discovery, said in an interview. “The ultimate performance of the system, we’ll wait to announce numbers on that.”