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AMD has signed a memorandum of understanding with the University of Oxford to support open academic frontier AI research at the British Open‑ended Learning and Discovery Lab (BOLD). The agreement outlines plans to expand compute access for researchers and deepen collaboration across software optimisation, model development and open‑source tooling.
Under the MOU, AMD would explore providing up to £5 million in compute resources for BOLD researchers over the 18 months following the lab’s launch. Support would be delivered through AMD infrastructure, cloud partners, public‑sector collaborations and hardware contributions, forming part of a phased programme that begins with broad exploratory experiments before progressing to more targeted research.
BOLD brings together researchers from the University of Oxford, University College London and Imperial College London to pursue fundamental advances in AI, including techniques beyond backpropagation, multiagent discovery systems and adaptive physical intelligence. The collaboration aims to accelerate experimentation while expanding open access to compute for academic teams.
Jakob Foerster, Associate Professor in Oxford’s Department of Engineering Science, said the partnership would help BOLD test ideas quickly and translate breakthroughs into real‑world applications, supporting research into learning, human‑AI collaboration and embodied intelligence.
Thomas Zacharia, senior vice president for Global Public Sector and Strategic Partnerships at AMD, said the company intends to combine advanced computing, open software and technical expertise to help researchers pursue new frontiers in AI and contribute to the UK’s leadership in innovation.
The work would build on AMD’s open software ecosystem, including permissively licensed projects such as ROCm, with plans to publish research software, benchmarks and evaluation tools while contributing improvements upstream to the wider open‑source community.
The agreement adds to AMD’s existing collaborations with UK institutions, including work with the University of Cambridge on the Zenith supercomputer and Sovereign AI Innovation Lab, and with Imperial College London on advanced AI and high‑performance computing research.
