It turns out Google isn’t the only American Big Tech company hopping across the pond to support the UK’s AI expansion efforts.
Nvidia (NVDA) said this week that it is partnering with CoreWeave (CRWV), Microsoft (MSFT), OpenAI and Nscale in an ambitious plan to help accelerate the infrastructure that will power the UK’s “AI industrial revolution.”
The companies are collaborating on a strategy to begin building and operating AI factories in the UK by the end of 2026 that will serve leading AI models, including OpenAI’s.
These AI factories will “scale up AI infrastructure” in the country with 120,000 Nvidia Blackwell Ultra GPUs and up to £11 billion (USD $15 billion) in investments for local data centers.
Nvidia will also enable Nscale, its UK-based cloud partner, to accelerate its global expansion with 300,000 Grace Blackwell GPUs across the globe.
In addition to 60,000 GPUs being established in the UK, Nscale is also deploying GPUs across Portugal, Norway and the United States.
Nvidia said that the companies are helping to “enable the U.K.’s sovereign AI goals for building a platform to power innovation, growth and opportunity across the economy.”
Nvidia and Nscale, along with OpenAI, will be launching Stargate U.K., featuring Blackwell Ultra GPUs operating in Nscale’s UK data centers by 2026. OpenAI plans to utilize this NVIDIA infrastructure to serve its models — including GPT-5, which is its latest reasoning model.
“Sovereign AI infrastructure is key to national resilience, economic growth and strategic autonomy,” Nscale CEO Josh Payne said in a statement. “This milestone deepens our commitment to providing critical AI infrastructure for the next industrial revolution.”
The announcement of investments by the US tech companies coincided with President Trump’s official State visit to the UK this week.
Alphabet’s Google (GOOG) also announced this week that it is opening a new AI data center in Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire, just north of London.
The new data center is part of Google’s two-year £5 billion (USD $6.8 billion) investment in the UK.
AI boom projected to jumpstart UK economy
Meanwhile, Nscale and Microsoft are planning to build the UK’s most powerful supercomputer in Loughton, featuring more than 24,000 Grace Blackwell Ultra GPUs that will help provide Microsoft Azure services in the country.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a statement that the world is “at the big bang of intelligence, and the United Kingdom’s Goldilocks ecosystem of world-class expertise, outstanding universities and vibrant industries is uniquely positioned to thrive in the age of AI.”
And CoreWeave announced its own plan to launch an advanced data center in Scotland with Grace Blackwell Ultra GPUs as part of the next £1.5 billion (USD $2 billion) phase of its investment in AI data center capacity and operations in the UK.
This brings CoreWeave’s AI infrastructure investment in the UK to £2.5 billion (USD $3.4 billion).
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) released a report last year in which it projected the UK economy to be one of the prime beneficiaries of the global AI boom.
The IMF said the productivity in the country would increase by 0.9% to 1.5% a year, which is higher than the 0.1% to 0.8% increase it projects across the rest of the global economy.
The report further stated that the UK economy could gain as much as 16% due to AI, with a significant portion of this happening in the first decade.
However, the IMF also predicted that AI could also increase income inequality in the country, with lower-income workers seeing a 2% increase in wages from the technology, versus 14% for people in the higher income brackets.
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