Sovereign cloud provider Civo has announced plans for 40 edge data centers in the UK, with the first to be sited in Hertfordshire.
The Hertfordshire site is currently being fitted out and will open next year at 8 MW, with plans to expand this to 38 MW.
As for the rest, the company has secured five further locations totalling 150 MW, with sites in Lancashire, Greater Manchester, London, and Oxfordshire, and the rest planned over the next three years.
With the rising use of AI agents inference workloads need to happen near the device making the request. Civo cited this trend as its justification for a distributed national network, rather than a single campus concentrated in one region.
Research from the firm earlier this year found that digital sovereignty is now viewed as a “strategic priority” by 73% of firms, but that only 15% have successfully migrated to a domestic provider.
"Britain has the talent. What it needs is infrastructure to match it. Policy alone will not deliver that. Compute, cooling and density have to exist physically, in this country, close to the organizations using them,” said Mark Boost, CEO of Civo.
"Our distributed edge network gives UK organizations sovereign, high-density infrastructure where the processing actually needs to happen, and gives international organisations a secure, compliant UK home for their services and data.”
Civo targets Vera Rubin gains
Civo will be among the first cloud providers in the UK to offer the Nvidia Vera Rubin platform, the successor to Blackwell, with up to five times the inference performance.
The Vera Rubin NVL72 system carries 288GB of HBM4 memory per GPU and brings together 72 Rubin GPUs and 36 Vera CPUs in a single rack.
Civo is taking orders for Vera Rubin now, alongside existing capacity on Nvidia B300, B200, H100 and H200 instances, with early-access pricing for Vera Rubin starting at $10.00 per hour.
All this runs on Civo’s AI stack, developed in-house to be open and interoperable, giving customers sovereignty over their data alongside UK compliance and security.
Notably, the sites are being built for direct-to-chip liquid cooling, with waste heat recovered and fed into district heating networks serving homes, factories and greenhouses local to each site.
FOLLOW US ON SOCIAL MEDIA
Follow ITPro on Google News and add us as a preferred source to keep tabs on all our latest news, analysis, views, and reviews.
You can also follow ITPro on LinkedIn, X, Facebook, and BlueSky.
ServiceNow says the AI race will create a 'human renaissance' jobs boom
Private cloud 2.0: How businesses can achieve cloud-like operations without lock-in
