The British government has announced a massive plan and a big bet on investment in artificial intelligence to develop a «decade of national renewal.» It includes special zones set aside for the construction of AI infrastructure.
The British government has announced a massive plan and a big bet on investment in artificial intelligence to develop a «decade of national renewal.» It includes special zones set aside for the construction of AI infrastructure.
As TechCrunch reports, the «Plan for Change» includes promises to invest in AI to accelerate public sector service delivery, as well as create geographic «AI Growth Zones.» This gives the green light to the construction of AI infrastructure, such as data centers and research and development zones.
In addition, the government said that private technology companies have pledged to invest 14 billion pounds ($17 billion) and create 13,250 jobs to achieve this goal.
The town of Culham, Oxfordshire, will become the first «AI Growth Zone» (it is already home to the UK Atomic Energy Authority, where AWS and CloudHQ have their data centres). It will see a twenty-fold increase in computing capacity and work on a new supercomputer. There will also be a new National Data Library, which will be a way to store and use public data for AI development, and a new Energy Council, which will look at how to deal with the energy needs of AI.
The government says its plan is based on 50 recommendations previously outlined by Matt Clifford, a venture capitalist who has advised both the current and previous administrations, and published an «AI Capabilities Action Plan» in July 2024 to outline them.
«Artificial intelligence will bring incredible changes to our country. But the AI industry requires a government that is on their side, one that will not sit idly by and let opportunities slip through our fingers. In a world of fierce competition, we cannot stand by. We must move fast and act to win the global race. Our plan will make Britain a world leader,» Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in a statement today.
The UK has been home to a number of big companies—DeepMind, the anchor of Google’s AI business, chipmaker ARM, and tens of thousands of startups and research groups doing groundbreaking work—but the country (like the rest of Europe) has yet to create a mega-business like Microsoft, Google, or Apple.
There is an opinion that greater attention to the development of large British hypercompanies will not only help the UK modernize and improve its economy, but also allow it to gain more sovereignty in the long term.
As a reminder, today, the Joe Biden administration released regulations governing how AI chips and models can be provided to foreign countries. These rules are essentially designed to govern how AI will spread around the world in the coming years.
