Tech giant Nvidia’s Jensen Huang has said that the UK is the largest AI ecosystem in the world without its own infrastructure, as the government announces a wave of partnerships with companies building facilities to underpin the technology.
While the UK only falls behind the US and China in terms of investment into AI, the country has come under fire from tech leaders in recent times for lacking the sovereign AI capabilities needed to scale the technology.
“The UK has one of the richest AI communities anywhere on the planet,” said Huang, speaking at London Tech Week. “The deepest thinkers, the best universities in Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial College, amazing startups like DeepMind, Wayve, Synthesia, an incredible research community.”
The missing piece of the puzzle is infrastructure, he said. “You can’t do machine learning without machines and so the ability to build these AI supercomputers here in the UK will naturally attract more startups.”
It comes less than a year on from the UK axing £1.3bn for tech and AI, including a supercomputer based in Edinburgh.
Huang’s comments came shortly after prime minister Keir Starmer, also speaking at London Tech Week, said that the government would invest £1bn in upgrading the UK’s compute power twentyfold — one of the measures announced in January as part of the country’s grand AI plan.
Starmer said his ambition was to make Britain an “AI maker, not taker”.
‘Goldilocks’ moment
Huang heaped praise on the UK’s “Goldilocks” position of having world-leading AI research and investment.
“The UK AI ecosystem is really perfect for take off,” said Huang. “The UK has the most abundant of the most critical of resources — AI researchers. You’re the envy of the world.”
But the UK is far behind US and Chinese rivals in AI investment. UK AI startups raised $4.3bn from VCs in 2024, according to a recent Dealroom report, way short of the US’s $80.8bn and China’s $7.6bn.
UK AI data centre startup Nscale, which was reportedly seeking a $2.7bn fundraise earlier this year, announced it would deploy 10k Nvidia Blackwell GPUs — one of the tech giant’s most powerful chips — in the UK by 2026.
The Netherlands-based cloud infrastructure provider Nebius also announced it was launching and deploying Nvidia chips in the UK.
Nvidia said it would launch an AI Technology Centre in Bristol to train developers building models, as well as set up a sandbox for finance firms to experiment using its chips, in collaboration with regulator the Financial Conduct Authority.
The tech giant will also be convening an initiative called the Sovereign AI Industry Forum — including founding members Babcock, BAE Systems, BT, National Grid and Standard Chartered — to advance adoption of AI.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/nvidia-jensen-huang-uk-ai-infrastructure/
