Nvidia is pumping up to £11bn into Britain’s AI ecosystem in a move that will see the UK host Europe’s largest GPU cluster by 2026, with 120,000 of its latest Blackwell Ultra chips deployed across new data centres.
The investment, unveiled late on Tuesday and timed to coincide with President Donald Trump’s state visit to the UK, is set to strengthen Britain’s position in the global AI arms race.
The leading chip giant will work with partners including Microsoft, CoreWeave and UK-based Nscale to build out the country’s sovereign compute capacity, a resource increasingly viewed as critical 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 framed the buildout as part of a broader redefinition of AI as essential national infrastructure, on par with energy or telecoms.
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.”
He described Nvidia not simply as a chip designer but as a ‘full stack’ provider of what the company calls ‘AI factories’, which are systems spanning hardware, networking and software, designed to power the new industrial revolution.
“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,” Hogan added.
A ‘Goldilocks opportunity’
The announcement follows Sir Keir Starmer’s collaboration pledge with Nvidia chief Jensen Huang at London Tech Week in June, where Huang warned that while the UK had immense AI potential, it lacked sovereign compute to capitalise on the generative AI boom.
Trump’s visit has provided political theatre around the latest wave of investment, with Nvidia’s Huang and OpenAI chief Sam Altman both expected to appear at high-profile events.
Google also announced a £5bn expansion of its UK cloud infrastructure during the week.
Nscale will 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 create ‘Stargate UK’, a data centre cluster expected to support models including GPT-5.
Microsoft, meanwhile, will work with Nscale to build what they describe as the UK’s most powerful supercomputer in Loughton, running on 24,000 GPUs to power Azure services.
Hogan stressed the scale of the UK’s opportunity if it can combine 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.”
The £11bn figure, Hogan explained, includes not only chip orders but the land, power and operations required 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.
Even with this push, Britain lags behind the US and Middle East in sheer scale.
OpenAI’s Oracle-backed Stargate project is targeting two million GPUs in the US, while Meta and Elon Musk’s xAI are also scaling aggressively.
The UAE is reportedly seeking licences to import 500,000 Nvidia GPUs per year.
Still, Hogan argued the UK’s strategy, including newly announced ‘AI growth zone’ where data centre construction is fast-tracked, will make Britain Europe’s undisputed AI leader.
“We can confidently say this is the largest GPU deployment in Europe,” he said
