Government-backed access to compute on the Isambard supercomputer cluster is what unlocked Cosine's ability to even attempt building a frontier sovereign LLM, since compute is the single biggest blocker for a startup of its size.
Alistair explains that being inducted into the UK government's sovereign AI unit and getting an allocation on the Isambard cluster removed the compute-cost barrier that would otherwise make a project of this scale impossible for a company Cosine's size. ✦ AI generated
Alistair Pullen · Machine Learning Street Talk · 2026-07-13 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 2:53
“So tell me the story.”
what that looks like in practice for us is um an allocation of compute on the ismpod supercomputer cluster out in Bristol. Uh and that has allowed us to well honestly it's one of the things that's unlocked our ability to even like have the ambition to do something like this right um fundamentally one of the biggest blockers for like a startup of our size or smaller to be honest on being able to approach work like this uh is a huge part of it is the compute
verbatim transcript · starts at 2:53
2:53looks like in practice for us is um an allocation of compute on the ismpod supercomputer cluster out in Bristol. Uh and that has allowed us to well honestly it's one of the things that's unlocked our ability to even like have the ambition to do something like this right um fundamentally one of the biggest blockers for like a startup of our size or smaller to be honest on being able to approach work
3:16like this uh is a huge part of it is the compute like if you raised you know 50 to 100 million bucks like a good chunk of that would go on compute on doing a project like this and to have allocation um come from the soft unit is is huge because it genuinely does enable it. Uh, and we still use some private compute on the side, but fundamentally all of it
3:36will um be done on Isizmbbard, which is which is super cool. And and to be honest with you, it it was some not something that was on my bingo card in January at the beginning of the year when we started out. Um, we I mean we still do our our I'd say our conventional business of like coding agents and uh the models that we already have built. Um, but we've been able to
3:57take that vision and really take it to the extreme in a way that we wouldn't have been able to otherwise. >> So, I'm not I'm not being funny, but the million-dollar question is um well, you actually more than that. Yeah. >> So, you know, um folks over there in the US, they they've got probably on the order of hundreds of of billions. You've got Mistra, which is on the order of,
4:16you know, let's say 14 >> single to double digit billions. Yeah. >> Something like that. How can you do in millions what they are doing with billions? >> Yeah. Yeah. No, it's it's a very fair question and one that I probably get more than anything else. We at Coine are not an inf an inference company. Uh and that sort of ties into the kinds of deployments and the way that we sell our
4:34product. Um so for your viewers I should probably give a bit of background given the fact that we predominantly deploy into highly secure high-sided environments. Most of the time now nearly all of the time we are not hosting the model ourselves. A customer isn't hitting you know cosign slash you know APIVv1 and then hitting a chat completions endpoint or something like that from us. They are either taking the