Running alongside President Trump's State Visit to the UK this week, the country has become the focus of some serious AI investments from America's best.
Following commitments from Google and Microsoft to building new AI datacenters in the country, OpenAI has announced arguably the biggest of all. The company's Stargate project — a previously announced mega-project to build out AI infrastructure Stateside — is headed to the UK.
The project will involve a number of sites across the country, but specifically a new "AI growth zone" in the North East of England.
From the announcement:
"We’re announcing Stargate UK—an AI infrastructure partnership with NVIDIA and Nscale that strengthens the UK’s sovereign compute capabilities. Stargate UK ensures OpenAI’s world-leading AI models can run on local computing power in the UK, for the UK—particularly for specialist use cases where jurisdiction matters. This will help power the UK’s future economy, boost its global competitiveness and deliver on the country’s national AI Opportunities Action Plan."
The idea of "sovereign AI" is increasingly important. While the core technology may be the same as used in the U.S., specialist and sensitive use cases, such as by the government or healthcare, naturally need to be controlled within a country's borders. That's a big part of this week's slate of announcements.
OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, commented:
“The UK has been a longstanding pioneer of AI, and is now home to world-class researchers, millions of ChatGPT users, and a government that quickly recognized the potential of this technology. Stargate UK builds on this foundation to help accelerate scientific breakthroughs, improve productivity, and drive economic growth. This partnership reflects our shared vision that with the right infrastructure in place, AI can expand opportunity for people and businesses across the UK.”
OpenAI will be providing its AI tech, as well as the OpenAI Academy, its AI literacy hub designed to help upskill the future AI workforce. The UK Government has ambitions for this to reach 7.5 million by 2030, which, now, is not that far away.
Nscale will be part of the infrastructure for the new datacenters, while NVIDIA will be supplying its most advanced GPUs to the project. Initially this will compromise 8,000 units in the first quarter of 2026, but could scale as high as 31,000 GPUs in the end. All of this hardware will allow OpenAI tech to run locally for use in the UK.
Even the UK's own, Arm Ltd, gets a nod, supplying designs that form part of NVIDIA's Grace Blackwell chips.
AI is very much here to stay, and its reach goes far beyond the chatbots many of us use daily, such as ChatGPT or Copilot. One positive we can all take from this, is that despite the concern (and sometimes warnings) of AI taking over jobs, the level of investment announced this week is going to create a ton of British jobs over the coming years.
