In a conversation with NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang at London Tech Week, U.K. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer confirmed that the U.K. will invest around £1 billion ($1.35 billion) in AI research compute by 2030, with investments commencing this year.
“We need to showcase what we have,” Starmer said. “This is a two-way conversation” between the government and industry. Starmer also underscored the U.K.’s “sovereign AI ambitions,” emphasizing that AI is not just about technology, but about codifying a nation’s culture, common sense and history.
U.K. ramps up AI efforts
The U.K. is taking major steps to achieve its AI ambitions, including launching a national AI skills initiative supported by the NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute, which aims to train developers in advanced AI skills. A new NVIDIA AI Technology Center in the U.K. is also launching to accelerate research in embodied AI, material science and earth system modeling.
The U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority is using NVIDIA tech to power its innovation sandbox for safe and secure AI experimentation. During the event, the U.K. government and NVIDIA also announced a new initiative to accelerate AI-native 6G research and deployment.
Further cementing the U.K.’s compute power, Isambard AI, the U.K.’s fastest AI supercomputer powered by 5.5k GH200s, is set to be fully operational this summer.
NVIDIA seeks additional investments in U.K.
AI is transforming the entire ecosystem, everything from healthcare and manufacturing to scientific research, Huang told the audience. “I make this prediction – because of AI, every industry in the U.K. will be a tech industry,” Huang said. For his part, Starmer added that his team is looking at every single department in government to see how AI can be used.
Starmer’s goal for the session was clear: to bring to life the real-world impact of the AI revolution and how AI is changing everyday lives for U.K. citizens.
“The U.K. has one of the richest AI communities of anywhere on the planet, the deepest thinkers, the best universities… and the third largest AI capital investment of anywhere in the world. So the ability to build these AI supercomputers here in the U.K. will naturally attract more startups, it will naturally enable the rich ecosystem of researchers here to do their life’s work,” Huang added.
To that end, NVIDIA will continue to invest in the U.K. “We’re going to start our AI lab here… we’re going to partner with the U.K. to upskill the ecosystem of developers into the world of AI,” Huang added.
All of these investments will build on one another. “Infrastructure enables more research, more research, more breakthroughs, more companies,” Huang said. That flywheel will start taking off; it’s already quite large.”
Read: South Korea to establish $34.4 billion fund to support advanced industries
NVIDIA expands footprint across Europe
The AI revolution is not only confined to the U.K. Across Europe, governments are no longer debating whether AI matters. Now the question in every capital isn’t why AI, it’s how soon can we deploy it at scale?
In Sweden, NVIDIA is working with Wallenberg Investments, AstraZeneca, Ericsson, Saab and SEB to build the country’s first national AI infrastructure, anchored by the NVIDIA Grace Blackwell platform. In Germany, the Leibniz Supercomputing Center is building Blue Lion — a €250 million supercomputer based on the new NVIDIA Vera Rubin architecture, designed for real-time AI, simulation and science.
Moreover, a joint venture in France between MGX, Bpifrance, Mistral AI and NVIDIA will establish Europe’s largest AI Campus in the Paris region, a 1.4 GW facility aiming to build sovereign and sustainable AI infrastructure for the continent.
“In the last 10 years, AI has advanced 1 million times. The speed of change is incredible,” Huang said.
NVIDIA added that its commitment to the U.K. is evident, with over 1,700 Inception members and 500 employees across four offices.
The AI giant is actively building the ‘AI factories of the future’ with leading U.K. companies, and it is powering the next generation of startups and scale-ups, from Basecamp Research to Wayve.
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