National LAB
National Lab is the central hub of CoSTAR Network, harnessing its infrastructure to scale creative R&D from inspiration to market ready pilots
Opening at Pinewood Studios in 2026, our CoSTAR Stage will place R&D at the heart of UK’s globally recognised home of storytelling.
CoSTAR Live Lab invites UK businesses to apply for the Intelligent Venues funding call. This exciting opportunity is in collaboration with CoSTAR National Lab
This report considers the challenges in developing a publicly available, machine-readable approach to copyright consent that protects the interests of copyright holders whilst allowing AI companies to legally access data. It is published by CoSTAR National Lab with the support of DECaDE and Sheridans.
CoSTAR National Lab announces partnership with experience technology company Magnopus
This report covers the period from CoSTAR National Lab's launch in 2023 through to the end of 2025, marking CoSTAR’s transition from establishment into early delivery and scaling across the UK, connecting with CoSTAR Network's specialist R&D Labs - Live Lab, Realtime Lab, Screen Lab and Foresight Lab.
The National Lab is led by the StoryFutures team at Royal Holloway, University of London and represents a unique collaboration between industry and academia.
Working alongside fellow academic partners Abertay University, the University of Surrey and the National Film and Television School, the National Lab also collaborates with an exciting series of industry partners including BT, Disguise and Magnopus, fuelling creative industry growth across the UK creative sector.
The National Lab will open its flagship CoSTAR Stage at Pinewood Studios in 2026, with additional access to a satellite facility, the Futures Studio, located on the Royal Holloway's campus in Egham, Surrey.
Facilities
National Lab is a state of the art, AI enabled virtual production and spatial audio studio. We are currently based at Futures Studio in Egham, and will be launching our flagship studio in Pinewood in late 2026.
To drive collaborative innovation and optimise testing environments, CoSTAR Network's technical infrastructure provides all Labs with access to AI Compute and BT 5G
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
This infrastructure is purpose-built to support training and prototyping of advanced AI systems—such as multimodal generative models for the creative industries—while also enabling research and development across academia, startups, and industry partners.
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.
Case Studies
Pioneering a personalised digital ticket to reimagine the audience journey and ticketing workflow
Through CoSTAR Ideate, SAIReco used National Lab’s AI Compute infrastructure to refine its pioneering socially responsible AI for real-time video transformation tools
CoSTAR National Lab doctoral programme
In early October 2025 we welcomed our first cohort of talented CoSTAR National Lab PhD students, to be based across our project partner universities. As we search for our next and final intake, meet our current students here.
