Nvidia And Hyperscaler Friends Do Massive AI Deals In The UK

As adoption of generative AI, agentic AI, and all other AIs expands around the globe, a focus in the industry can enable nations to more closely use its own infrastructure, workforces, and data to control, create, and deploy AI models. Sovereign AI over the past year gained momentum, fueled by national concerns about data security, risk mitigation, compliance, local innovation, and geopolitical competition and vendors’ efforts to address those demands.

Nvidia has made sovereign AI a fundamental pitch for its AI factories, full-stack infrastructures and platforms that allows governments and local companies to build and deploy specialized datacenters. AI factories are popping up in such countries as Denmark, Sweden, and Italy, where a focus is on creating an Italian AI language model for government users.

OpenAI is spreading its Stargate Project – which launched in January as a four-year, $500 billion investment to build new AI infrastructure in for OpenAI in the United States – to other parts of the world, including the United Arab Emirates, where the plan is to build a 1 GW supercomputing cluster. Stargate initiatives also have appeared in such places as Norway.

Other high-profile vendors like Microsoft, Google, and IBM have made similar investments and partner announcements in local AI initiatives.

“The more everyone needs to rely on a digital brain built by plunging into the depths of the internet, the more interest there is in shaping access – and, the thinking goes, no single nation should have a monopoly on that process,” the World Economic Forum wrote late last year.

Or, as David Hogan, vice president of enterprise EMEA at Nvidia, said during a prebrief with journalists this week, “AI is now an essential form of national infrastructure, just like energy, telecommunications, and the internet. Every country needs sovereign AI, the ability to produce AI with its own infrastructure, data, language and culture. Just as countries built national electric grids, they are now building AI infrastructure to manufacture our most valuable resources: intelligence.”

The UK Is In Play

Now comes the United Kingdom’s time in the sovereign AI spotlight, and the spotlight is bright. Microsoft, Nvidia, Google, and OpenAI are helping to drive a $42.3 billion effort to fund a range of AI-based initiatives that range from building datacenters, supercomputers, and infrastructure to expanding their own UK operations and funding research, with the announcements coming as President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced the US and UK Tech Prosperity Deal.

Microsoft president Brad Smith wrote that the IT giant is investing $30 billion over four years, half of which will go towards building out the country’s cloud and AI infrastructure. The money also will go to building the UK’s largest supercomputer, which will include more than 24,000 GPUs from Nvidia. The investment will help “expand access to trusted American technology and strengthen the infrastructure that will drive economic growth and technological advancement in the AI era,” Smith wrote.

Nvidia’s contribution of as much as $15 billion will include developing AI factories – powered by 120,000 “Blackwell Ultra” B300 GPUs – in the UK to scale the country’s AI infrastructure, with another 300,000 “Grace Blackwell” GB300 CPU-GPUs hybrids for datacenters around the globe. Those datacenters will include OpenAI’s new Stargate UK project, an initiative to both expand the country’s AI infrastructure and create more compute capacity for OpenAI.

“OpenAI will explore offtake up to 8,000 GPUs in Q1 2026 with the potential to scale to 31,000 GPUs over time,” the company wrote. “This sovereign capacity will enable OpenAI’s models to run on local computing power for specialist use cases such as critical public services, regulated industries like finance, research projects or national security partnerships.”

Nvidia’s latest effort comes two months after Isambard-AI was fired up, at 21 exaflops of AI performance the country’s largest supercomputer housed at the University of Bristol and holding 5,448 of Nvidia’s GH200 Grace Hopper chips, went online.

Google is contributing $6.8 billion, aimed at infrastructure and AI research. There also will be a new AI datacenter – at a cost of $1 billion – that is scheduled to go online this week. The research will include Google’s DeepMind AI research lab, which is based in London.

Demis Hassabis, DeepMind’s co-founder and chief executive officer, wrote on LinkedIn that the new technology deal between the United States and UK will “will help to ensure our scientists continue to lead on the breakthroughs and innovations that will define the future. In particular, we look forward to working with both governments to advise on how scientists can harness the latest AI tools, as well as building on our partnership with the UK Atomic Energy Authority to advance fusion energy research in the US and the UK.”

Nscale Becomes A Major Player

A common thread that runs through all of these announcements is Nscale, a UK AI company that started life in May 2024 as a spinoff of cryptocurrency mining firm Arkon Energy. It launched later that month with $155 million in Series A funding in hand and a plan to expand AI infrastructure in the country and elsewhere.

A year later, it’s playing a central role in Britain’s new-found AI fortunes. The company is partnering with Microsoft in building the massive new UK datacenter, and with Nvidia in its efforts to deploy 300,000 Grace Blackwell GPUs in new AI factories in the United States, Portugal, and Norway.

Nscale is also part of the triumvirate – along with OpenAI and Nvidia – that is kicking off the Stargate UK project. It also is a key player in Stargate Norway, an initiative announced in August with OpenAI and Norwegian investment firm Aker ASA to develop an AI datacenter in northern Norway that will include 100,000 Nvidia GPUs and will be powered by 230 MW of hydropower initially before scaling up with another 290 MW.

Great Britain’s Great AI Ramp

While the new investments in Britain’s AI infrastructure are significant, the country has been growing its AI and supercomputing capabilities over the past several years, as the Isambard-AI supercomputer shows.

Earlier this year, the UK government announced its AI Opportunities Action Plan that looks to leverage the ongoing AI research in the country, as well as its startups and established players in the space – including DeepMind as well as OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, and Meta AI, which all have offices in the UK – and its AI Safety Institute.

In July, the country created its Sovereign AI Unit, with up to $680 million to invest in high-potential AI startups in Britain, develop homegrown AI assets like data, compute capacity, and talent, and partner with “frontier AI” companies that are driving innovation.

“The UK is the world’s third-largest AI market, and its AI sector is the largest in Europe, at around $100 billion,” Nvidia’s Hogan said. “The combined market value of UK tech companies is now worth more than $1.2 trillion. It has a rich ecosystem of world-class universities, bold start-ups, top researchers and cutting-edge supercomputing.”