UK data center firm Kao Data is set to host a new AI inference lab funded by the UK government.

Kao Data this week announced it had been chosen by CommonAI to host the company’s AI Scaling Inference Lab at Kao’s data center campus in Harlow.

Funded by the UK’s Advanced Research & Invention Agency (ARIA) and delivered by CommonAI, the lab aims to provide a neutral environment where emerging AI technologies are tested and benchmarked against commercial systems

Under the agreement, CommonAI will deploy a series of high-density, GPU-accelerated AI clusters within two dedicated technology suites.

Each cluster will test distinct approaches to AI infrastructure, including pipeline parallelism, heterogeneous orchestration, and nanosecond optical circuit switching, with all five clusters aiming to become operational by early 2027.

The deployments will be a mix of GPUs and accelerators, including Nvidia HGX B300, H200 NVL, RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPUs, and AMD Instinct MI350X accelerators – housed within Supermicro, MSI, Fujitsu Primergy, and Dell PowerEdge servers.

“Kao Data’s Harlow campus is perfectly situated between London and Cambridge, two of the UK’s most important AI hubs, making it the ideal home for the Scaling Inference Lab,” said David Stringer, Partnerships Lead, Scaling Inference Lab at CommonAI.

“With advanced levels of security and a distinctive design, the campus provides us with a solid environment to welcome startups, investors and policymakers into the lab, and provides UK innovators with a neutral place to prove their technologies at rack scale – strengthening and supporting the Government’s wider AI ambitions.”

Kao’s Harlow campus launched in 2018. The site was originally set to host four 10MW buildings, and has two operational data centers – KLON-01 and 02 – each offering 10MW. Work began on the site’s second data center in March 2022 and was completed in late 2023. In March 2025, it announced KLON-03, a new 17.6MW facility at the campus, and in September 2025 revealed plans for a further two data centers, bringing its total to five buildings.

Nvidia’s Cambridge-1 supercomputer sits within Kao’s original Harlow facility. European neocloud Nebius is also taking capacity at the Harlow site.

“Kao Data has a long heritage of hosting some of the UK’s most advanced AI and supercomputing workloads, and we are proud to become home to the Scaling Inference Lab,” said Spencer Lamb, Kao Data CEO. “The work taking place at our Harlow campus will help shape the next generation of UK AI, ensuring the country remains a leader in AI development while meeting the growing demand for sovereign, homegrown AI infrastructure and the resources needed to support the country’s world-leading startup community.”

ARIA launched the Scaling Inference Lab earlier this year with a £50 million ($66m) commitment. In June, the UK Government announced more than £20m ($26m) in additional funding.

The lab’s first cluster build-out started earlier this year, using hot aisle containment, launching in June. Set to run until April 2027, cluster 1 is designed to explore whether pipeline parallelism can unlock meaningful inference performance from commodity GPU hardware. Cluster 2 will deploy in August 2026, looking at whether intelligent workload distribution can optimize performance across mixed hardware environments. Where these first two clusters were hosted hasn’t been shared.

Cluster 3 will look at whether reductions in interconnect latency via optical switching translate to meaningful gains in end-to-end AI inference throughput.

The Scaling Inference Lab’s technology partners include Quettaflop AI, Callosum and Oriole Networks.

Kao was launched in 2015 and is owned by Infratil, Legal & General, and Goldacre. As well as Harlow, the company operates a data center in Slough, a former Barclays data center in Northolt, and is developing a new campus in Manchester. The company recently bought an industrial site in London’s Park Royal for data center development.

The company says its data center portfolio includes more than 237 MW of IT load, either currently operational, under development, or planned.

Kao is named after Sir Charles Kao, who won a Nobel Prize for physics for his creation of optical fiber cables while working at the Standard Telephone Laboratories (STL) research center in Harlow. The labs were located on the land that now hosts the company’s data centers.