At the Wellcome Sanger Institute, one of the most ambitious biodiversity efforts in modern science is already underway: sequencing 70,000 animals, plants, fungi and protists across the British and Irish Isles as part of the Darwin Tree of Life project. By mapping and analyzing the DNA of thousands of species, the project is helping researchers better understand how life is connected, how ecosystems evolve, and how conservation strategies can be strengthened before more biodiversity is lost. The work is also contributing to the broader Earth BioGenome Project, supporting global research efforts in biodiversity and conservation.

The scale of that mission is extraordinary. More recently, the Institute has increased its sequencing pace to one genome every six hours, an improvement from the one genome every seven hours in November 2025. The genomic data generated is published openly, creating a global resource for researchers and supporting critical efforts to better understand species relationships, preserve biodiversity, and strengthen conservation strategies.

But ambitions at this scale also create a pressing operational challenge. Genome sequencing, the process of determining the DNA makeup of an organism, becomes significantly more complex as data requirements grow, which means research organizations need infrastructure capable of moving discovery forward quickly, accurately and efficiently.

To meet that need, the Institute deployed the Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA and Dell PowerEdge XE-Series servers on premises. Together, these technologies created a tailored high-performance environment designed to support enormous data requirements and enable scalable, precise genome mapping.

Dell PowerEdge XE-Series servers powered by NVIDIA accelerated computing became the foundation of a genomic engine built for speed, precision and growth. This combination gave the Institute the ability to handle highly complex genomic workloads, including species with extremely large genomes that would previously have been difficult to process efficiently.

The impact of this infrastructure transformation has been substantial. The Institute contributes approximately 70% of global data for the Earth BioGenome Project and maintains more than 100 petabytes of curated genetic sequencing data on premises.

Just as important, the Institute is now able to process extraordinarily large genomes, including mistletoe at nearly 100 gigabase pairs, or roughly 30 times the size of a human genome. In practical terms, that means work once considered computationally unfeasible is now achievable.

Those gains came from giving the Wellcome Sanger Institute the infrastructure foundation needed to translate scientific ambition into operational progress. By combining Dell Technologies’ scalable enterprise infrastructure with NVIDIA accelerated computing, the Institute was able to reduce barriers that often slow AI-enabled research and move faster from experimentation to measurable outcomes.

Dr. Peter Clapham, Informatics Support Group Team Leader at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, describes the Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA as helping ensure each investment is architected for success, optimizing platforms to scale efficiently and accelerate the science required for species mapping.

For executive leaders, the Wellcome Sanger Institute story offers an important reminder: transformative AI outcomes depend on more than algorithms. They depend on infrastructure, ecosystem alignment and technology partnerships that can support real-world scale.

Dell Technologies and NVIDIA helped the Wellcome Sanger Institute create the performance, scalability and efficiency required to transform genome sequencing into an accelerated engine for discovery. Find out more about how Dell supports the Wellcome Sanger Institute here.