Nvidia is injecting up to £11bn into Britain’s AI ecosystem in a development that will establish the UK as home to Europe’s most substantial GPU cluster by 2026, featuring 120,000 of its cutting-edge Blackwell Ultra chips across newly constructed data centres.
The investment, announced late on Tuesday and strategically timed alongside President Donald Trump’s state visit to the UK, is poised to bolster Britain’s standing in the worldwide AI competition, as reported by City AM.
The prominent chip manufacturer will collaborate with partners including Microsoft, CoreWeave and UK-based Nscale to expand the nation’s sovereign computing capabilities, a resource increasingly recognised as vital to national competitiveness.
“This is the biggest single investment by a technology organisation in the UK”, David Hogan, Nvidia’s vice president for enterprise EMEA, told reporters on Tuesday.
“We’re enabling our partners to deploy 300,000 GPUs globally, and 60,000 of those will be in the UK. Together with CoreWeave, that totals 120,000 GPUs deployed here by the end of 2026.”
Hogan characterised the expansion as part of a wider reimagining of AI as fundamental national infrastructure, equivalent to energy or telecommunications.
He said: “AI is now an essential form of national infrastructure, just like energy, telecommunication and the Internet.
“Every country needs sovereign AI – the ability to produce AI with its own infrastructure, data, language and culture.”
Nvidia is not merely a chip designer, but a ‘full stack’ provider of what the firm refers to as ‘AI factories’, systems that encompass hardware, networking and software, designed to fuel the new industrial revolution, according to Hogan.
“These AI factories will provide infrastructure for the world’s most widely adopted models to run locally, empowering a new generation of UK researchers, developers and entrepreneurs to do groundbreaking research,” added Hogan.
A ‘Goldilocks opportunity’
This announcement comes after Sir Keir Starmer’s pledge to collaborate with Nvidia chief Jensen Huang at London Tech Week in June. Huang cautioned that while the UK possesses immense AI potential, it lacks sovereign compute to capitalise on the generative AI boom.
Trump’s visit has brought political drama around the latest wave of investment, with appearances expected from both Nvidia’s Huang and OpenAI chief Sam Altman at high-profile events.
Google also announced a £5bn expansion of its UK cloud infrastructure during the week.
Nscale plans to deploy 60,000 of Nvidia’s Grace Blackwell GPUs in Britain as part of a global rollout of 300,000 units across the US, Portugal and Norway.
Its partnership with OpenAI will result in ‘Stargate UK’, a data centre cluster expected to support models including GPT-5.
Meanwhile, Microsoft will collaborate with Nscale to construct what they describe as the UK’s most powerful supercomputer in Loughton, running on 24,000 GPUs to power Azure services.
Hogan emphasised the magnitude of Britain’s potential if it successfully merges capital, policy and infrastructure.
“The UK has a true Goldilocks opportunity,” he said.
“We have the right conditions for rapid AI growth and innovation in the country. The only thing that’s been missing is infrastructure. Today, we’re announcing that Nvidia is building new AI infrastructure to support strong, secure and sustainable economic growth across the UK.”
Hogan clarified that the £11bn sum encompasses not merely chip purchases but also the land, power and operations necessary for new data centres.
“It’s quite a considerable investment, and it’s a real turbo charge for a UK organisation to be able to go and do that”, he added.
Despite this initiative, Britain trails the US and Middle East in terms of sheer magnitude.
OpenAI’s Oracle-supported Stargate project aims for two million GPUs in the US, whilst Meta and Elon Musk’s xAI are also expanding aggressively.
The UAE is reportedly pursuing licences to import 500,000 Nvidia GPUs annually.
Nevertheless, Hogan contended that Britain’s approach, including the recently unveiled ‘AI growth zone’ where data centre development is expedited, will establish the UK as Europe’s unrivalled AI frontrunner.
“We can confidently say this is the largest GPU deployment in Europe,” he said.
