The AI plan includes things like establishing a national data library and designated ‘growth zones’
U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer detailed The AI Opportunities Action Plan, designed to bolster AI growth and development across the country. The plan, said Starner, will help Britain become “one of the great AI superpowers.”
Tech companies Vantage Data Centres, Kyndryl and Nscale have already demonstrated their support for the plan with the commitment of £14 billion ($17 billion) to be used to build out the UK’s AI infrastructure and create 13,250 jobs. This support is in addition to the £25 billion ($30 billion) in AI investment announced at the International Investment Summit.
Specifically, Vantage Data Centres said it will invest more than £12 billion ($14.5 billion) in data centers across the UK, which it claims will result in roughly 11,500 more jobs; Kyndryl will create up to 1,000 AI-related jobs in Liverpool over the next three years; and Nscale will build the largest UK sovereign AI data centre in Loughton, Essex by 2026.
Leading the charge is government AI advisor and venture capitalist Matt Clifford who previously provided 50 AI-related recommendations that include things like building “sufficient, secure and sustainable” AI infrastructure, establishing a national data library to ensure wide and productive access to new data and designated “growth zones” to consolidate infrastructure development and fast-track investment — the first zone will be in Culham, Oxfordshire. You can read more about his recommendations here.
The government program will see AI integrated into public services sectors like education and healthcare, as well as the development of a new supercomputer to increase the UK’s compute capacity twentyfold by 2030.
Days following a landslide election victory for Starmer, former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair told the incoming cabinet that the only way forward is get “radical” with AI. Technology, and AI in particular, is the answer, he said, to the “perennial progressive dilemma whereby the sensible people appear not to be radical, and the radical people appear not to be sensible.”
This can be done, he added, by harnessing digital-change tech to drive economic growth. “At first glance, the state of the public finances might make this moment seem like the most limiting in living memory to be forming a new government. Yet if you consider the opportunities now presented by technology, it might actually be the most exciting and expansive,” he said.
Starmer appears to have gotten the message, promising in yesterday’s speech that the government “will be pro-growth and pro-innovation” in its regulation of AI. “We will test and understand AI before we regulate it to make sure that when we do, it’s proportioned and grounded in the science,” he said. “Our message to those at the frontier of AI capabilities is this: We want to be the best state partner for you anywhere in the world — that’s the measure of our ambition.”
