By Karoline Leonard
Publication Date: 2025-11-18 18:11:00
The University of Texas at Austin has acquired 4,000 Nvidia advanced graphics processing units for its Horizon supercomputer project, strengthening the university’s lead over academic AI power.
The new Blackwell GPUs, Nvidia’s most advanced AI chips to date, will power new Dell Technologies servers and other Nvidia AI infrastructure, all to be installed as part of Horizon, the largest academic supercomputer in the nation. Horizon, which is funded by the National Science Foundation, will go online next year at UT’s Texas Advanced Computing Center and will be housed at Sabey Data Centers’ Round Rock campus.
“Our greatest responsibility is to benefit society and support our state and nation through our teaching and research activities,” UT President Jim Davis said in an announcement on the acquisition. “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.”
The now more than 5,000 Nvidia GPUs give UT the most AI computing power in academia, according to UT’s announcement. When Horizon comes online in the spring, it will be 10 times as powerful as Frontera, currently the most powerful academic supercomputer, which is also housed at UT’s Texas Advanced Computing Center.
UT is reserving more than 1,000 of the GPUs for faculty and student researchers through its Center for Generative AI, which was created…
