For Donald Trump, today was primarily about one thing.
Before boarding Air Force One to make the transatlantic flight to the UK, he told reporters on the White House Lawn: “It’s to be with Prince Charles and Camilla, they’re friends of mine for a long time… you’re going to have some great pictures, it’s going to be a beautiful event.”
Britain delivered. After a military welcome, lunch with the King and Queen and a Red Arrows flypast, the president has already got more than enough photographs to admire on the plane back home. Luckily, pomp and circumstance is something we do well.
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But this was not an altruistic display. These things rarely are. As British governments have done in the past, the Starmer team leveraged Britain’s soft power to advance its own aims. Beyond the fanfare, Starmer wants to catch the president’s ear on foreign policy issues, including Gaza and Ukraine. But they are also there to talk money: investment and trade.
On trade, we faltered. The US refused to budge on its 25% tariff imposed on the aluminium and steel Industry (a reminder perhaps that no amount of tea with the King will get the US to act against its interests).
But in the arena of investment the British government is already declaring victory. Trump arrived in Britain along with a who’s who of the US tech scene.
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Jensen Huang, chief executive of the AI chipmaker Nvidia, Apple’s Tim Cook, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, and Sam Altman of OpenAI all made the journey over. Today, they are attending a state dinner at Windsor Castle along with the president but they had other reasons for coming too.
Many of them were here to announce major investments, running into the tens of billions of pounds, to build AI data centres in the UK under a new US-UK tech deal.
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These are private investments but the government is viewing them as a win for Starmer. His administration is – like the one before it and the one before that- scrambling to unlock economic growth in the UK. It is pinning its hopes on the transformational promise of AI.
The prospect of greater economic growth, productivity and jobs is an alluring one for Britain and, indeed, most of western Europe’s ailing economies. The hope is that these investments will build the digital infrastructure needed to turbocharge the AI industry in the UK.
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The government said the deals, which came from Nvidia, Microsoft, OpenAI, Google among others, were a “vote of confidence in the UK.” And there are, of course, compelling reasons why Britain’s existing AI ecosystem is attracting these companies. It has little to do with the King.
World class researchers, universities and scientific research have contributed to an ecosystem in Britain that is ripe for take off. Deep Mind was perhaps the most famous success story, a company that Google swooped in to acquire in 2014.
That is something Jensen Huang, chief executive of Nvidia was keen to remind us. Ahead of his trip to Windsor, he expressed surprise at Britain’s sometimes dysphoric attitude about its own capabilities.
“This week we’re here to announce that the UK is going to be a superpower… but you know, Britons can be a bit humble, even deprecating, about their successes. Really, this is a moment to celebrate the UK ecosystem.”
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He said that Britain was at the cusp of a new Industrial Revolution, and it should seize the moment.
“This is the home of the origins of artificial intelligence and some of the brightest minds in AI are here. So the expertise of creating artificial intelligence and creating and training large language models is deep here.”
The UK has obvious expertise and appeal. It is the third largest AI market in the world, after the US and China. It is home to a third of Europe’s AI start-up companies and twice as many as any other European country.
Where it falters is infrastructure. High energy costs and a creaking grid are holding back growth in data centres. The government has promised to rectify this (which has caught the attention of the tech giants, hungry as they are for energy and computational power.) The deal with the US will also see both sides cooperate to expand nuclear energy in the UK.
Not everyone is comfortable with all this attention from the Americans, however. US dollars will help to fund the expansion in data centres but US AI companies like OpenAI, which is partnering with Nvidia and Nscale to open a data centre in Blyth, will be at the forefront of the opportunities too.
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Open AI will secure the access to infrastructure, energy and computing power to run and train its models. Meanwhile Nvidia will provide the chips. Nscale, the British data centre company, is set for huge growth but- where France boasts Mistral- the UK has no comparable national AI champion. For all the claims of “sovereign AI”, some may wonder whether building data centres in the UK is enough to give us sufficient control over this powerful new industry, when so much of the technology is American.
Speaking to Sky News, Mr Huang batted away those concerns. “Sovereign AI starts with having your sovereign data…you have lots of your own data. The data of your people, of your companies, of your society. That data is created here. It belongs to you. You should use it to train your own large language models. There’s going to be a whole bunch of different AI models being created here, and I have every confidence, so long as we provide the instrument of the science.”
