Microsoft is taking the lead with a $30 billion investment over the next four years. About half of this funding will be directed towards new data center builds, upgrades, and AI infrastructure. The company plans to deploy 23,000 advanced AI chips in UK facilities and will collaborate with Nscale to establish a supercomputing hub in Loughton. These efforts are designed to support the large-scale training of generative AI models and high-performance computing applications across various sectors.
Nvidia has committed up to £11 billion in the UK, partnering with hyperscale operators and specialists like CoreWeave and Nscale. The company plans to deploy 120,000 Blackwell Ultra GPUs into UK data centers by 2026, with over 60,000 units earmarked for AI “factories.” These installations will offer enterprises, researchers, and public sector organizations access to sovereign computing resources, reducing the UK's dependence on overseas capacity. Nvidia is also collaborating with OpenAI and Nscale on the Stargate UK project, with initial deployments in Newcastle, which will expand from 8,000 to over 30,000 GPUs in future phases.
Google and Salesforce have also made significant contributions to the UK’s AI development. Google has committed £5 billion towards AI initiatives and the construction of a new data center at Waltham Cross, while Salesforce has pledged around $6 billion to expand AI-driven cloud services.
Together, these announcements mark the largest wave of foreign technology investment into the UK in over a decade, reinforcing the country’s ambition to build a competitive AI ecosystem. The UK government has framed these deals as crucial to its industrial strategy, focusing on regional growth, job creation, and skills development. Officials have also emphasized the benefits of housing compute infrastructure domestically, particularly as demand for trusted AI and data services rises globally.
For the connectivity ecosystem, these investments signify a substantial scale-up in hyperscale capacity and send a clear message that the UK is positioning itself to compete at the forefront of global AI infrastructure.
