‘This is the largest AI ecosystem in the world without its own infrastructure’: Jensen Huang thinks the UK has immense AI potential – but it still has a lot of work to do
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has said the UK has enormous AI potential but needs significant infrastructure buildout to make the most of it.
Speaking alongside UK prime minister Keir Starmer at London Tech Week, Huang insisted that building AI supercomputers in the UK will be necessary to kickstart investment.
“The UK is in a Goldilocks circumstance,” Huang said, explaining that it has “one of the richest AI communities anywhere on the planet” and attracts the third largest amount of AI venture capital investment in the world, after the US and China.
Together, Huang argued, these factors make the UK a very attractive region for AI spending.
“It’s a fantastic place for VCs to invest – the ecosystem is really perfect for takeoff.”
But the Nvidia chief executive also warned the UK is the “largest AI ecosystem in the world without its own infrastructure,” comparing the challenge for researchers to astronomers trying to do their work without radio telescopes.
“You can’t do machine learning without a machine – and so the ability to build these AI supercomputers here in the UK will naturally attract more startups, it will naturally enable all the rich ecosystem of researchers here to do their life’s work,” he explained.
The UK government has committed to building out the UK’s compute capacity 20x by 2030, as announced in its AI Opportunities Action plan back in January.
During his speech at London Tech Week, Starmer announced an extra £1 billion ($1.35 billion) in funding to support this expansion and pledged to rapidly expand the construction of data centers and labs.
Huang argued that once the foundational infrastructure is in place, with Nvidia directly involved, research can feed into business which will further drive infrastructure buildout.
“I think it’s just such an incredible place to invest – I’m going to invest here,” Huang added.
UK firms are flocking to Nvidia hardware
Nvidia’s hardware is used around the world for AI data centers and supercomputer infrastructure. The firm is already heavily involved in UK projects such as the Bristol-based Isambard-AI supercomputer.
At the event, AI cloud platform provider Nscale announced plans to build UK AI infrastructure comprising 10,000 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs, while AI infrastructure firm Nebius committed to building a UK AI factory using 4,000 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs.
Starmer repeatedly stated that the government is committed to an ongoing conversation with the private sector to double down on the UK’s AI expertise.
“If there’s one thing I want to get across today, it’s that we are leaning into this,” Starmer said.
“We are excited about the potential that this could have, will have, on the lives of millions of people and making their lives better,” he added.
“I came into politics quite late in my career to improve the lives of working people across the country and I can see here the huge potential to do that at a scale and speed which I didn’t necessarily think would be possible.”
The day before the event, the government hosted a meeting between cabinet ministers and select representatives from the tech industry including Huang, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
Attracting AI investment and expanding AI skills is a key aim of the UK government, and while onstage Starmer urged attendees to reach out to the government to get involved in public-private partnerships.
The UK government has separately committed to new funding for AI skills, with an aim to train 7.5 million people by 2030 in partnership with companies such as Nvidia, Google, and Microsoft.
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