• BT has been building up to a sovereign pitch for months
• Now it has launched what it calls a ‘full suite’ of sovereign services
• The UK telco has also struck a deal with neocloud Nscale to build AI infrastructure capacity in the UK

Just a few months after signalling its intentions to meet the increasing digital sovereign service demands of UK enterprises, BT has proclaimed itself to be the first service provider in the UK to “offer a full, end-to-end sovereign portfolio for public and private sector organisations – combining sovereign connectivity, voice, cloud and AI”. 

And to underpin its service provisioning plans, it has announced that it will, in partnership with UK-based neocloud Nscale, develop “sovereign AI datacentres in the UK, using Nvidia full stack AI infrastructure”. The national UK telco stated: “The move will expand the UK’s AI capability using trusted nationwide networks – enabling organisations to adopt AI securely, at scale and under UK control. Nscale plans to build up to 14 megawatts of AI datacentre infrastructure across three existing strategic BT sites in the UK. BT will provide infrastructure and connectivity to these new datacentres, which will significantly expand the UK’s AI compute capacity in response to surging demand.‍” 

This deployment “will enable organisations to run AI workloads domestically, scale capacity on demand and meet data residency, security and regulatory requirements – supporting use cases from operational automation to advanced analytics and AI-assisted customer service.”

Organisations using BT’s sovereign AI capability will be able to:

• Run AI models in the UK, supporting regulatory, data residency and security requirements
• Scale AI capacity on demand, without upfront capital investment in infrastructure
• Adopt advanced AI technologies, while maintaining operational resilience and control

More on this plan in a moment…

With regards to the services, BT announced in December last year that it was to launch a new sovereign data platform and kickstarted its offer with the unveiling in late February of Sovereign Voice, a “new state-of-the-art sovereign cloud calling system that offers UK businesses a new way to stay connected, bolster resilience and meet changing regulations.” 

Now BT Business, the telco’s B2B arm, it is pitching a “full” portfolio offered from BT’s “expanded sovereign platform” that has been developed to “help customers keep sensitive workloads in the UK, strengthen operational control and deploy advanced digital services faster – without compromising on security, resilience or compliance,” though details of the specific services are currently lacking.

The exception is BT Business’s new Sovereign Cloud offer, which is a private cloud platform hosted and operated entirely within the UK. “Designed for organisations handling sensitive or regulated workloads, it provides compute, storage and backup capabilities underpinned by Rackspace Technology’s UK datacentre infrastructure, with UK-based, security-cleared teams and managed services to support migration, operations and ongoing compliance,” noted BT. 

To help with the marketing of its portfolio, the commercial launch comes as a new report from Assembly Research, which highlights “concerns over data security” that are “holding back AI adoption in the UK. By giving organisations clearer control over how data is stored, accessed and governed, digital sovereignty can provide the confidence needed to scale AI securely,” and as ever, a massive number has been assigned to the value of the associated productivity boost, which in this case is an estimated £18bn for the UK economy.

The report also highlights “the wider commercial opportunity created by sovereign infrastructure. Accelerated investment in UK-based datacentres could generate £14.6bn by 2030, while the expansion of sovereign cloud services is estimated to be worth an additional £13.6bn over the next five years.”

Jon James, CEO of BT Business, stated: “Organisations, public and private, want to move fast with AI and cloud while keeping control over the sovereignty of their data. That’s why BT is the first UK provider to offer a complete sovereign portfolio – from secure connectivity and voice to sovereign cloud and AI – all delivered in one place. Only BT has the scale and infrastructure to help customers modernise critical services with confidence, delivering real benefits for organisations and for the UK as a whole.”

As for that new supporting infrastructure that’s being developed with Nscale, which recently raised $2bn in its Series C round of funding, the timescales, financials and datacentre infrastructure details have not been shared. 

TelecomTV is waiting to hear what kind of sites BT is planning to use (former local exchanges, perhaps), when this capacity could come online and how much will be invested in these sites. 

We’re also looking to find out by just how much BT’s 14 MW of capacity will expand the UK’s total compared with what is already available. 

Based on existing facilities, 14 MW of AI datacentre capacity, if taken together, would be the equivalent of  a mid-sized datacentre with something in the region of 40,000 servers. 

- Ray Le Maistre, Editorial Director, TelecomTV