Nvidia, which has a UK base in London, has announced an investment of up to £11bn in the UK’s artificial intelligence ecosystem. This development is expected to make the UK home to Europe’s most substantial GPU cluster by 2026, which will feature 120,000 Blackwell Ultra chips across new data centres.
David Hogan, Nvidia’s Vice President for Enterprise EMEA, commented: “This is the biggest single investment by a technology organisation in the UK. We’re enabling our partners to deploy 300,000 GPUs globally, and 60,000 of those will be in the UK. Together with CoreWeave, that totals 120,000 GPUs deployed here by the end of 2026.
AI is now an essential form of national infrastructure, just like energy, telecommunication and the Internet. Every country needs sovereign AI – the ability to produce AI with its own infrastructure, data, language and culture. These AI factories will provide infrastructure for the world’s most widely adopted models to run locally, empowering a new generation of UK researchers, developers and entrepreneurs to do groundbreaking research.”
This announcement follows Sir Keir Starmer’s pledge to collaborate with Nvidia chief Jensen Huang in June. Huang had previously stated that while the UK has immense AI potential, it lacks the necessary sovereign compute to take full advantage of the generative AI boom.
Google has also announced a £5bn expansion of its UK cloud infrastructure during the same week. Nscale intends to deploy 60,000 of Nvidia’s Grace Blackwell GPUs in Britain as part of a global rollout of 300,000 units across the US, Portugal, and Norway. The partnership with OpenAI is expected to result in ‘Stargate UK’, a data centre cluster that will support models including GPT-5.
Microsoft will also work with Nscale to build what they have described as the UK’s most powerful supercomputer in Loughton, which will run on 24,000 GPUs to power Azure services.
David Hogan concluded: “The UK has a true Goldilocks opportunity. We have the right conditions for rapid AI growth and innovation in the country. The only thing that’s been missing is infrastructure. Today, we’re announcing that Nvidia is building new AI infrastructure to support strong, secure and sustainable economic growth across the UK. It’s quite a considerable investment, and it’s a real turbo charge for a UK organisation to be able to go and do that.”
Despite this project, Britain still lags behind the US and the Middle East in terms of scale. OpenAI’s Oracle-supported Stargate project aims to feature two million GPUs in the US, while Meta and Elon Musk’s xAI are also pursuing aggressive expansion plans.
Image source: LinkedIn
