Infrastructure
One of the largest ever investments in the UK's creative industries.
CoSTAR's infrastructure gives creative companies unprecedented and inclusive access to specialist facilities, expertise and technical capabilities across five UK Labs.
In a rapidly evolving industry, our infrastructure is designed to outpace the rate of change by creating a flexible platform for experimentation and production with a unique combination of facilities and expertise.
Our studio Labs are equipped with connectivity that allows creatives to harness technology in whole new ways with:
- state-of-the-art facilities tailored to each Lab's specialism including sound stages, spatial audio and motion capture facilities
- integrated media networking
- private 5G connectivity providing a platform for creative experimentation across each CoSTAR facility
- AI Compute capability with high performance servers and ultra-fast storage due to significantly expand in May 2026
- access to CoSTAR Network's world class researchers, technologists and engineers
- industry partners
This will provide a platform for new forms of collaboration between geographically distributed experts and research teams, allowing the UK to lead in developing the next generation of production workflows, digital performance, and multi-sensory storytelling.
CoSTAR Network invites UK companies of all sizes to take part in regular, funded opportunities to experiment with and test our infrastructure, while providing business support for growth.
Our CoSTAR Network creative technologists, engineers & researchers will also collaborate with industry on prototyping projects.
CoSTAR is a place for thinking, connecting, developing, testing, building and innovating
Our infrastructure is housed in five Labs across the UK in London, Surrey/Buckinghamshire, York, Belfast, and Dundee. Find out about full studio specifications below.
AI Compute specifications
The CoSTAR National Lab is developing a state-of-the-art AI compute facility to drive innovation in creative technology and beyond.
Our pilot cluster is already operational, offering:
- 3 high-performance servers, each hosting 4 or 8 GPUs and up to 2TB of system memory
- 20 NVIDIA H200 GPUs, each with 141GB of next-generation high-bandwidth memory
- Ultra-fast NVMe storage, optimised for AI workloads
In 2026, we will expand to a full-scale cluster, delivering:
- 10 additional 8 way GPU servers, each designed for high-demand AI workloads
- 80 additional NVIDIA H200 GPUs bringing the system to more than 14TB of total GPU memory
- High-speed interconnects (400Gb InfiniBand) for large-scale, multi-node training
- 750TB of ultra-fast NVMe storage
- 2 high-performance multi-purpose compute units for virtualised and containerised workflows:
- AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7960X
- 2 NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96GB GPUs
- 128GB RAM
- 4TB NVMe storage
- NVIDIA ConnectX-6 Dual 100GbE NIC
- Server equipped with 2× NVIDIA H100 GPUs (160 GB VRAM combined, 80GB each), 386 GB RAM, 19TB of NVMe storage, and AMD EPYC 9334 processors with 128 cores.
- Server equipped with Titan RTX 12GB VRAM and 2x NVIDIA 4080 GPUs with 8 GB VRAM each and 64 GB RAM
- Server equipped with 2x nvlinked RTX 6000 ADA with 48GB VRAM (96GB combined)
Workstation — Dell Precision Tower 7960
- NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada Blackwell, 48GB
- 128GB RAM
- Intel Xeon CPU, 12 cores
- 2TB NVMe storage
- 16TB mechanical storage
Control and Render Node — AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7975WX
- 32 cores
- 256GB RAM
- NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada, 48GB
LED Volume Processing
- 2× Brompton Tessera SX40
Standalone PCs — 10× Dell Alienware
- NVIDIA RTX 4090
- Intel Core i9, 28 cores
- 64GB RAM
BT 5G infrastructure
BT 5G infrastructure offers a secure private network to support development, testing and demonstration activity for CoSTAR network labs and associated companies.
This includes:
- Ericsson EP5G core hardware
- Fortinet security and switching
- Encrypted BT SIMs
- Licensed N77 spectrum
- A dedicated backhaul connection and ongoing managed support
In practice this gives the labs a reliable private 5G platform for creative experimentation with wireless production workflows, realtime video streaming, connected devices, immersive audience experiences and other early stage use cases with industry partners.
