The cash mountain includes $15.5 billion in capital projects and $15.1 billion to fatten its UK operations. Vole said the plan would give the country its “largest supercomputer” packed with more than 23,000 GPUs, built with British cloud firm Nscale.
Nvidia, Google, OpenAI and Salesforce all chimed in with their own multi-billion investments, pushing the combined tally above $40 billion.
The announcements land just as Donald Trump begins his state visit to Britain. He rolled up on Tuesday evening and will be welcomed at Windsor Castle on Wednesday by King Charles and Queen Camilla.
Prime minister Keir Starmer, still reeling from the resignation of deputy PM Angela Rayner in a house tax scandal and a messy reshuffle, is under pressure to prove the UK can still attract big investment.
On a call with hacks, Microsoft president Brad Smith admitted his view of Britain had shifted since regulators tried to sink the company’s $69 billion takeover of Activision-Blizzard in 2023. “I haven’t always been optimistic every single day about the business climate in the UK. I am very encouraged by the steps that the government has taken over the last few years,” Smith said.
Smith added: “just a few years ago, this kind of investment would have been inconceivable because of the regulatory climate then and because there just wasn’t the need or demand for this kind of large AI investment.”
The UK government claims Trump and Starmer will sign a shiny new deal on Wednesday “to unlock investment and collaboration in AI, Quantum, and Nuclear technologies.”
Nvidia has pledged £11 billion (€12.7 billion) with Nscale and US infrastructure outfit CoreWeave. As part of that deal, Nvidia plans to drop 120,000 Blackwell GPUs in Britain, its largest-ever European deployment.
Nvidia’s Europe sales boss David Hogan told hacks: “This will truly make the UK an AI maker, not an AI taker.”
Google will lob in £5 billion (€5.8 billion) for AI work, including a new data centre in Waltham Cross, just north of London. Google reckons it will create more than 8,000 jobs annually for UK businesses.
OpenAI is joining with Nscale and Nvidia on “Stargate UK”, a spin-off of its mega-project with SoftBank and Oracle. It plans to start with 8,000 GPUs early next year, scaling up to 31,000 over time, with the first big build at Cobalt Park in Newcastle.
Salesforce is hiking its UK investment to $6 billion (€5.6 billion), up from the $4 billion it promised in 2023.
Its UK boss Zahra Bahrololoumi claimed Trump’s visit “reaffirms the very important relationship between the UK and US.”
CoreWeave also announced a further £1.5 billion (€1.7 billion) to boost UK data centre capacity, taking its total pledge to £2.5 billion (€2.9 billion).
