September rundown: The UK becomes an AI playground

Big tech has announced tens of billions in infrastructure investments for the UK – how will it help?

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The UK has immense AI potential, according to some of the biggest names in tech, with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang having described the region as being in a “Goldilocks circumstance” due to its strong AI ecosystem and rich academic history.

This month, the US tech ecosystem made its first significant contribution to recognizing this reality with tens of billions invested in the UK ecosystem.

Will it pay off? And what does this investment mean in practical terms?

In this episode, Rory welcomes back Ross Kelly, ITPro’s news and analysis editor, to unpack this bumper investment in the UK tech ecosystem.

Highlights

"When you go back to Nvidia's initial announcement at the start of the week, it's basically committed over 120,000 GPUs in total for the entire country. So, yeah, this is huge amount of hardware that's going to be pouring into the UK in the next couple of years. I mean, from your perspective, the way I look at this is you have the headline numbers, the £11 billion. But you know, I think you also have to take into account that a significant portion of this investment will be taken up by the GPUs themselves."

"In terms of the private sector here, I think it is the same case where we have a really fantastic, really vibrant tech sector in the UK but it has been, I guess, impeded, inhibited in terms of the infrastructure there. When you go back to the beginning of the sort of generative AI boom, there was the big talking point around, you know, power grids, and whether the national grid would be able to cope with surging power demands, also data center capacity as well."

"When you look at how a lot of big hyperscalers operate as well, in terms of their cloud zones, they've often been on regional or national scale. But I think given the way we're going, like you said in terms of redundancy and whatnot, a more hyper-localized network of data centers, of infrastructure across the UK, makes sense."

Footnotes

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Rory Bathgate
Rory Bathgate
Features and Multimedia Editor

Rory Bathgate is Features and Multimedia Editor at ITPro, overseeing all in-depth content and case studies. He can also be found co-hosting the ITPro Podcast with Jane McCallion, swapping a keyboard for a microphone to discuss the latest learnings with thought leaders from across the tech sector.

In his free time, Rory enjoys photography, video editing, and good science fiction. After graduating from the University of Kent with a BA in English and American Literature, Rory undertook an MA in Eighteenth-Century Studies at King’s College London. He joined ITPro in 2022 as a graduate, following four years in student journalism. You can contact Rory at rory.bathgate@futurenet.com or on LinkedIn.

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