A year ago at London Tech Week, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang and U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer made a declaration: the U.K. would be an AI maker, not an AI taker.
At this year’s event, NVIDIA and its partners are showcasing how that commitment is producing real momentum across the nation’s infrastructure, startups and enterprises.
U.K. technology leaders are innovating across healthcare and life sciences, coding, agentic AI, inference and more — all running on sovereign AI deployments.
AI Minister Kanishka Narayan said: “A year ago, we said the UK would be an AI maker, not an AI taker. Today we’re delivering on that — with sovereign compute powering British startups to push the boundaries of what AI can do, from drug discovery to healthcare to robotics. This is what it looks like when a country backs its own talent with the infrastructure to match.
“NVIDIA’s decision to invest billions here is a reflection of the strength of what’s being built in Britain. We are determined to make sure the next generation of AI breakthroughs happens in this country, and we have everything we need to make it happen.”
Commitment to Compute
Over the past year, the number of AI cloud providers planning to deploy AI infrastructure on U.K. soil has doubled.
Nebius has announced plans to expand customers and cloud capabilities with three new deployments of advanced NVIDIA AI infrastructure, as the NVIDIA AI Cloud ecosystem partner continues to build out its commercial and AI R&D hub in London. Combined, the deployments are expected to reach 65 megawatts when fully ramped up in 2027.
CoreWeave is building in the U.K. Government’s AI Growth Zones, and seven more NVIDIA AI Cloud ecosystem partners have plans in the pipeline. BT and Nscale announced plans to build sovereign AI data centers across three existing BT sites in the U.K., combining NVIDIA AI infrastructure, Nscale’s full stack and BT’s trusted nationwide connectivity backbone.
From Fund to Frontier
Central to that sovereign compute story is Isambard-AI — the U.K.’s most powerful computer. Built on 5,400 NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips and running entirely on zero-carbon electricity, it’s the engine behind some of the U.K.’s most ambitious AI research.
The U.K. government’s Sovereign AI Fund is putting that capability to work by backing homegrown companies and providing the domestic infrastructure needed to scale their ambitions.
Among its first recipients is Ineffable Intelligence, which recently announced a collaboration with NVIDIA to build the future of reinforcement learning infrastructure.
Other recipients include four U.K.-based NVIDIA Inception startups, each pushing the AI frontier using Isambard-AI. These startups are:
Cosine Builds Sovereign Coding Platform
Cosine is building an end-to-end sovereign AI coding platform for highly regulated industries such as financial services, critical infrastructure and national security. Using Isambard, Cosine is training a new, large-parameter, mixture-of-experts, multimodal agentic LLM for natively handling data types beyond text and image.
“Access to Isambard enables the project, full stop,” said Alistair Pullen, cofounder and CEO of Cosine. “We already have the people who know how to do this. We have the data. We have the infrastructure and the training. The thing we’ve never had is this level of compute.”
Cursive Trains Self-Improving AI Systems
Cursive is building self-improving AI systems that learn continuously from real-world data, enabling them to operate autonomously over long periods of time. This is unlocked through new memory-augmented architectures with dramatically larger context windows, currently in development using the Sovereign AI Fund resources. In addition, the team recently adopted the NVIDIA Megatron-LM framework for distributed training at scale.
“The Sovereign AI Fund is more than just processing power — it’s a statement about investing in AI in the U.K.,” said Talfan Evans, cofounder and CEO of Cursive. “Sovereignty is actually now a buying criterion — and it’s a challenge to tap into the resources we uniquely have as U.K. and European companies.”
Doubleword Optimizes Inference to Deliver Abundant Intelligence Tokens
Doubleword, the U.K.’s first dedicated inference lab, optimizes every layer of the AI stack to maximize what it calls “IQ per dollar.” The company deploys open models including NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Super 120B and builds on the NVIDIA Dynamo inference framework.
On Isambard, Doubleword’s early results achieved 70x faster model cold starts — aka model loading times — and 4x lossless KV cache compression, critical advancements for long-running agentic workloads. The result: inference at 90-95% lower costs than other leading inference providers.
“Sovereign AI is most impactful at the inference layer,” said Meryem Arik, cofounder and CEO of Doubleword. “Inference is when you’re actually getting the value from the model — we want that value created in the U.K., with U.K. compute and U.K. data centers.”
Prima Mente Uses Foundation Models to Study Alzheimer’s and More
Prima Mente builds biological foundation models to identify new biomarkers, subtypes and drug targets of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and ALS. With its Isambard allocation, the company is developing Pleiades 2, a foundation model combining five biological data modalities.
Achieving nearly 3x speedups in model training with NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, Prima Mente also uses NVIDIA Parabricks for genomic data processing and NVIDIA Transformer Engine for model optimization.
“Research shows Alzheimer’s might be 25 different subgroups of disease, and we want to help by using AI to identify these subtypes and the biology within the cells as they change,” said Hannah Madan, cofounder of Prima Mente.
Video courtesy of Nebius and Prima Mente.
AI Talent, Policy and Production
NVIDIA’s £2 billion investment in the U.K. startup ecosystem — in collaboration with leading venture capital firms — is bringing new capital and advanced AI infrastructure to major U.K. hubs including London, Oxford, Cambridge and Manchester.
U.K. membership in the NVIDIA Inception program has increased by 50% over the past year. AI-native companies like Doubleword, Synthesia and PolyAI are scaling globally from U.K. roots.
At last year’s London Tech Week, NVIDIA announced a collaboration with the U.K Department for Science, Innovation and Technology on 6G and AI skills. The 6G collaboration has seeded testbeds at four U.K. universities. In May, the NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute (DLI) delivered two new courses — added to support the nation’s wireless research community — to participants from over 30 U.K. universities.
Plus, as part of this AI skills collaboration, NVIDIA DLI courses are offered as part of QA’s AI Apprenticeships in England.
And the NVIDIA Developer Program now includes more than 200,000 U.K. developers.
The Sovereign AI Forum, which launched last year with seven charter members, convened the country’s AI leadership to turn policy into deployment roadmaps. Over the past year, the Forum has welcomed dozens of participants across government, industry and the startup community — turning policy into deployment roadmaps.
And enterprise AI is moving from pilot to production:
- Apian is building digital twins of two National Health Service hospitals, combining autonomous devices, ground robots, computer vision and robotic simulation.
- Deliverance AI is helping regulated enterprises to run, govern and scale AI agents inside their own environment — through a single control plane. The Agentic Operating System is built for organizations where data sovereignty is non-negotiable.
- Glass Futures has installed an AI-driven digital twin of its glass furnace capable of testing and predicting new, optimal ways to make glass. The digital twin taps into NVIDIA accelerated computing and the NVIDIA PhysicsNeMo framework.
- Orbital Industries has announced codesigned, NVIDIA Vera Rubin DSX AI Factory-compliant AI infrastructure that accelerates time to first token.
- Reading Football Club is partnering with Stelia to establish an AI Centre of Excellence, combining Stelia’s full-stack AI platform with accelerated compute infrastructure from NVIDIA and Lenovo.
It all reflects momentous progress in U.K. AI leadership — and offers a glimpse of where it’s heading.
