US tech giants underpin UK’s digital infrastructure future

• US President Donald Trump is visiting the UK
• Digital infrastructure investments are among the related business announcements made to coincide with the occasion
• Google, Microsoft, Nvidia and more are to provide the technology that enables the UK’s sovereign cloud and AI services

A phalanx of US tech giants have announced investments and projects in the UK to coincide with President Donald Trump’s state visit to ‘Blighty’ (as we like to call it here), underlining just how reliant countries such as Britain are on the economic and technical firepower from across the Atlantic.

The announcements came as the UK and US announced a broad ‘Tech Prosperity Deal’, “focused on developing the fastest-growing technologies, like AI, quantum and nuclear.”

The UK will benefit from new datacentre facilities in the north-east of England, where the government has announced an AI Growth Zone that includes the development of a major datacentre hub, spread across various sites in Blyth and Cobalt Park near Newcastle upon Tyne. US investment firm Blackstone has committed £10bn of investment towards the Blyth site, “providing the potential for an additional £20bn in investment from future partners,” noted the UK government in this announcement. 

Meanwhile, Cobalt Park is set to be one of the multiple sites for AI infrastructure deployments by OpenAI, Nvidia and UK-based AI infrastructure firm Nscale, which jointly have announced the formation of Stargate UK, “an overarching infrastructure platform designed to deploy OpenAI’s technology in the UK, with a particular focus on sovereign workloads”. (Stargate is, of course, the name also used for the giant AI infrastructure project in the US announced in January this year.) 

OpenAI is to commit to the use of up to 8,000 Nvidia GPUs in the first quarter of 2026, with the potential to scale to 31,000 GPUs over time. 

Nscale will also deploy 4,600 Nvidia GB300 GPUs in partnership with Nvidia DGX Cloud, including for the DGX Lepton Marketplace, which will support AI developers across the UK.

In addition, Nscale and Microsoft are teaming up to deploy what they claim will be the UK’s largest AI supercomputer at Nscale’s AI Campus in Loughton, Essex. The site will boast 50MW of AI capacity, scalable to 90MW, and will initially house 23,040 Nvidia GB300 GPUs, the deployment of which will start in early 2027. “This facility will play a vital role in providing Microsoft’s Azure services across the UK, supporting every sector of the economy,” noted Nscale. 

In total, Nscale is set to deploy up to 58,640 Nvidia GPUs across the UK: Globally, Nscale plans to deploy 300,000 Nvidia GPUs across multiple territories.

To help Nscale on its way, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced on Wednesday morning that his company is making a £500m investment in the UK-based firm, reported The Guardian.  

Nvidia also made its own media announcement about its involvement in the UK, noting that the deployments it is making with Nscale, Microsoft and Coreweave, which announced a £1.5bn investment in a datacentre in Scotland, add up to investments totalling £11bn. 

“The United Kingdom is building the infrastructure for the AI industrial revolution – advancing science, transforming industries and creating new economic opportunities,” stated Huang in this announcement. “We are 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. With AI supercomputers powering state-of-the-art models locally, a new generation of UK researchers, developers and entrepreneurs will drive discovery and build the companies of tomorrow.”

Microsoft, meanwhile, announced a plan to invest $30bn in AI infrastructure and ongoing operations across the UK during the four years from 2025 to 2028. “This marks the largest financial commitment we’ve ever made in the UK. It includes $15bn in capital expenditures to build out the UK’s cloud and AI infrastructure,” part of which is the AI supercomputer deployment with Nscale, noted the tech giant in this blog.

Microsoft noted: “Our capital investment will also expand our datacentre footprint to meet growing AI demand and adoption from customers across every sector in the UK – from Barclays, the NHS, the London Stock Exchange Group, the Premier League, Vodafone, UK Met Office, Unilever and Wayve – customers that are rapidly embracing AI to transform their businesses. Vodafone has expanded Microsoft Copilot to 68,000 employees worldwide after seeing productivity gains of four hours per week during its pilot. Barclays is rolling out Copilot to 100,000 colleagues and integrating it into its own tools to unlock insights and efficiency, while developers at the London Stock Exchange Group are using GitHub Copilot and Windows 365 to dramatically accelerate secure, trusted application development.”

Meanwhile, Google announced that as part of a £5bn investment over the next two years, it is opening a new datacentre in Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire. The facility “will help meet growing demand for AI services like Google Cloud, Search and Maps,” it noted in this announcement.

– Ray Le Maistre, Editorial Director, TelecomTV