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Nvidia’s Jensen Huang has warned 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 “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 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 account for more than half its data centre revenues.
Nvidia on Monday announced 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. Private AI investment in the UK last year was $4.5bn, compared with $109.1bn in the US and $9.3bn in China, according to data from Stanford University’s 2025 AI Index Report.
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.
The extra £1bn in spending announced at London Tech Week will go towards expanding the UK’s AI Research Resource, a planned network of supercomputers that was launched in 2023 as part of a £300mn initiative at the UK-hosted AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park.
The government on Monday also announced that all civil servants would undergo AI training from the autumn, with officials “tasked with assessing how they can use the technology to streamline their own work wherever possible”.
The government said it was part of plans to “create a civil service that will take more calculated risks”, with cabinet secretary Sir Chris Wormald saying he wanted them to consider how it “needs to evolve and reform”.
Additional reporting by David Sheppard
