UK to welcome Europe's largest GPU data center, a £11 billion endeavor led by tech giant Nvidia.
UK AI Boom: Tech Giants Invest Heavily in Britain's AI Future
The United Kingdom is witnessing a surge in artificial intelligence (AI) growth and innovation, with tech giants pouring billions into the country's AI ecosystem. Nvidia's Vice President for enterprise, EMEA, David Hogan, has highlighted the UK's favourable conditions for rapid AI advancement.
The UK government's AI Opportunity Action Plan, unveiled in January, includes plans to establish 'AI growth zones', with a new one announced in North East England, across Blyth and Cobalt Park outside Newcastle. This move is expected to boost the region's tech industry potential.
Nvidia's investment forms part of an effort to address the UK's lack of sovereign compute capabilities and infrastructure for capitalising on the generative AI 'boom'. The tech giant, in partnership with Nscale and CoreWeave, has committed a combined investment of £11 billion in the UK's AI ecosystem. Nscale alone will deploy 60,000 GB300 chips, with a significant increase from the 10,000 GPUs it announced it would deploy at London Tech Week in June.
Nscale will also deploy a total of 300,000 Blackwell GPUs worldwide, with the US, UK, Norway, and Portugal identified as areas of investment. The infrastructure for the Stargate UK project, a collaboration between Nvidia, Nscale, and OpenAI, will be partially located at the Cobalt Park site, with the remainder yet to be allocated. OpenAI will use 8,000 GPUs from Nscale's pledged 60,000 for 'Stargate UK'.
Google is also investing heavily in the UK, announcing a £5 billion investment into UK infrastructure, including AI-related costs at Google DeepMind. The tech giant has also opened a new data center in Broxbourne to expand its UK cloud availability.
Other tech companies are following suit. Salesforce UK's chief exec, Zahra Bahrololoumi, has touted the country's tech industry potential. Meanwhile, ByteDance Ltd., the Chinese internet technology company, is partnering with Nscale Global Holdings for AI infrastructure development, though the exact countries beyond the UK are not specified.
The investments in AI infrastructure are aimed at serving enterprise compute demand, researchers, and consumers. By the end of 2026, Nvidia will deploy 120,000 Blackwell GPUs in the UK, making it Europe's largest GPU cluster. Blackstone has announced a £10 billion plan for a data center at the Blyth site, with the potential for an additional £20 billion in investment from other partners.
Despite the US, Meta, OpenAI, and xAI having larger GPU deployment plans compared to the UK, the UK is set to have an order of magnitude more chips at its disposal by next year. This investment is a testament to the UK's growing status as a global AI powerhouse.
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