Nvidia chief says UK lacks digital infrastructure as Keir Starmer pledges £1bn for AI

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Nvidia’s Jensen Huang has warned that the UK lacks the digital infrastructure it needs to capitalise on its potential in artificial intelligence, as Sir Keir Starmer pledged another £1bn to expand Britain’s computing power for AI.

Speaking alongside the British Prime Minister at the opening of London Tech Week on Monday, Huang praised the UK for what he called its “Goldilocks” position of having both “incredible” AI research talent and the biggest private investment in the technology outside the US and China.

“The [British AI] ecosystem is really perfect for take-off,” said Nvidia’s chief. “It’s just missing one thing. It is surprising: this is the largest AI ecosystem in the world without its own infrastructure.”

The comments came shortly after Starmer announced what he described as a “huge increase in the size and power of Britain’s AI engine” with an extra £1bn in funding to “scale up [the UK’s] compute power by a factor of 20”.

“We can be an AI maker, not an AI taker,” Starmer said, adding that the digital infrastructure would help the UK use AI to improve public services.

The announcement comes as AI cloud providers Nscale and Nebius launched plans to build new facilities in the UK housing thousands of Nvidia’s latest chips, which will start coming online later this year.

Nvidia is looking to “sovereign AI” deals such as these, as well as much larger new contracts announced last month with governments in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates seeking to build vast data centres needed to handle AI workloads.

Big deals with countries would allow the semiconductor giant to diversify its business away from the small group of Big Tech companies, such as Microsoft, Amazon and Meta, that currently account for more than half its data centre revenues.

On Monday, Nvidia announced that it would launch a new AI Technology Centre in Bristol to train developers in building AI models, robotics and other skills.

It is also establishing a new body called the “UK Sovereign AI Industry Forum” with local companies including BAE Systems, BT and Standard Chartered, in an effort to accelerate AI adoption.

In addition, the Silicon Valley-based chipmaker is working with the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority and fintech start-up NayaOne to create a “digital sandbox” for testing AI in financial services.

The UK is home to several prominent AI start-ups including Synthesia, Wayve and Quantexa, as well as many researchers working for Google DeepMind, which was founded in London more than a decade ago.

However, the UK’s funding gap with the US and China remains large. According to data from Stanford University’s 2025 AI Index Report, private AI investment in the UK last year was $4.5bn, compared with $109.1bn in the US and $9.3bn in China.

This year, the UK unveiled its AI Opportunities Action Plan, written by venture capitalist Matt Clifford, which called for an increase in government-owned capacity to an equivalent of 100,000 of today’s Nvidia graphics processing units by 2030.