Nvidia touts its contribution to UK sovereign AI plans

AI cloud firm Nebius is planning three new deployments of Nvidia infrastructure in the UK, in a deal that, said Nvidia, supports the UK government's AI Opportunities Action Plan.

The £1.7 billion investment forms part of Nebius's plans to expand its commercial and AI research and development hub in London. The three deployments will use the latest generations of Nvidia's full-stack, end-to-end AI factory platform technology, and are expected to reach 65 MW when fully ramped up next year.

"The UK is one of Europe's most ambitious AI markets, with a clear public policy framework and a strong base of innovators," said Paolo Guglielmini, vice president EMEA at Nvidia.

"Nebius is expanding local access to Nvidia's full-stack AI factory platform, giving British companies the best performance, economics, and ecosystem support to train and deploy frontier and open-source AI close to their data, customers, and teams."

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As part of the plan, Nebius has signed a ten-year, 22 MW deal with data center developer Kao Data for a deployment at its Harlow data centre campus, powered by 100% renewable energy and supported by HVO-powered generators.

"The UK is a major destination for AI and is becoming an important part of Nebius's global footprint," said Andrey Korolenko, chief product and infrastructure officer at Nebius.

"By bringing dedicated capacity to support inference workloads, we can enable UK AI builders and enterprises to achieve their AI goals."

Nvidia is touting the deal – along with several others – as evidence of its commitment to the UK.

CoreWeave is building in the government's AI Growth Zones, and seven more Nvidia AI Cloud ecosystem partners have plans in the pipeline. BT and Nscale are building sovereign AI data centers across three existing BT sites, based on Nvidia AI infrastructure.

Cosine is building an end-to-end sovereign AI coding platform for highly regulated industries such as financial services, critical infrastructure, and national security, based on the Isambard-AI supercomputer, built on 5,400 Nvidia GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips.

Cursive is working on self-improving AI systems that learn continuously from real-world data, enabling them to operate autonomously over long periods of time, part-funded through the Sovereign AI Fund.

"The Sovereign AI Fund is more than just processing power – it's a statement about investing in AI in the UK," said Talfan Evans, cofounder and CEO of Cursive.

"Sovereignty is actually now a buying criterion – and it's a challenge to tap into the resources we uniquely have as U.K. and European companies."

Meanwhile, Doubleword, the UK's first dedicated inference lab, deploys open models including Nvidia Nemotron 3 Super 120B and builds on the Nvidia Dynamo inference framework; and Prima Mente is building biological foundation models to identify new biomarkers, subtypes and drug targets of Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and ALS.

"We're determined to make the UK the best place in the world to build and deploy AI – backing the infrastructure businesses, researchers and public services need to put this technology to work," said UK AI minister Kanishka Narayan.

"Nebius's investment brings significant AI compute into the UK, giving companies what they need to train, test and run advanced systems here at home – helping drive productivity by rolling AI out widely across the economy."