NVIDIA's (NVDA, Financial) CEO Jensen Huang recently pointed out the UK's lack of digital infrastructure essential for advancing AI, despite its strong AI research talent and significant private investment. UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer committed to investing an additional £1 billion to enhance the nation's AI computing capacity by 20 times, aiming to transform the UK from an AI consumer to a producer.
New facilities are planned by cloud service providers Nscale and Nebius, incorporating thousands of NVIDIA's latest chips, expected to be operational later this year. This aligns with NVIDIA's strategy for "sovereign AI" partnerships, reducing reliance on large tech companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta, which currently represent over half of NVIDIA's data center revenue.
NVIDIA also announced a new AI technology center in Bristol to train developers in AI model building and robotics. Despite having renowned AI startups like Synthesia and Wayve, and being home to Google DeepMind researchers, the UK's AI investment lags significantly behind the US and China. The UK’s private AI investment last year was $4.5 billion, compared to $109.1 billion in the US and $9.3 billion in China.
