To tie in with US president Donald Trump’s state visit, the UK and US have agreed to the Tech Prosperity Deal, to boost the development and deployment of artificial ininformigence (AI), quantum and nuclear technologies.
Building on the £44bn UK government investment in the AI and tech sector and a commitment to invest a total of £31bn from Microsoft, Nvidia, Google, OpenAI and CoreWeave, Labour is aiming to build the UK Europe’s largest gigafactory.
As part of the pact, the UK and US will unite to forge joint research schemes to further the utilize of AI to allow for tarreceiveed treatments and other shared priorities, such as fusion energy. This could see both countries working toreceiveher to build AI models for life-modifying breakthroughs such as tarreceiveed treatments for those suffering with cancer or rare and chronic diseases.
Parliamentary under-secretary of state for the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology Kanishka Narayan described the agreement as “the first-ever UK-US tech deal”. “I consider it has the potential to transform lives right across Britain,” he added.
When questioned about the lack of sufficient onshore tech skills, Narayan declared: “The starting point is that Britain has amazing talent already.”
Along with the skills across universities, researchers and AI startups, he also spoke about Labour’s 50-point AI opportunities plan. “We are going to be laser-sharp focutilized on the execution of the skills element,” declared Narayan. “We’ve been focutilized on building sure that we are receiveting people to invest in British talent and British firms.”
Among the goals he sees for the UK-US tech partnership is “to convince the very best founders across the world that Britain is the right place for them to build”. To achieve this, Narayan declared the government is working with UK startup Nscale to deploy Europe’s largest graphics processing unit (GPU) clusters.
According to Narayan, Nvidia has committed to supply 120,000 GPUs to the UK over the next 12 months. “We’re announcing to every talented founder across the world that Britain now has a scale of compute availability, one fundamental input that gives them the confidence to build here,” he declared.
Narayan declared OpenAI will deploy 8,000 GPUs in the first phase. This is projected to grow up to 60,000 Nvidia Grace Blackwell Ultra GPUs. Microsoft is also committed to investing £22bn, including 23,000 advanced GPUs, to deliver the UK’s largest AI supercomputer, in Loughton. Both of these deals also involve Nscale, which recently announced it was building an OpenAI Stargate project in Norway, utilizing 100,000 Nvidia chips.
There is also the £5bn Google has invested in a datacentre facility in Waltham Cross.
Narayan declared the opportunity for the UK was not only in building out sovereign compute at scale, but also to build the UK the world’s best place for the uptake and deployment of AI to support improve people’s lives.
Prime minister Keir Starmer declared: “By teaming up with world-class companies from both the UK and US, we’re laying the foundations for a future where toreceiveher we are world leaders in the technology of tomorrow, creating highly skilled jobs, putting more money in people’s pockets and ensuring this partnership benefits every corner of the United Kingdom.”
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