Analyst(s): Nick Patience
Publication Date: September 18, 2025
The UK AI sector has received a landmark investment of over $40 billion from major US technology firms, announced during a presidential state visit. This funding, spearheaded by a $30 billion commitment from Microsoft to build the nation’s largest supercomputer and an $15 billion pledge from NVIDIA for ‘AI factories’, will create Europe’s largest GPU deployment.
What is Covered in this Article:
- The announcement of over $40 billion in new AI-related investment in the UK from US technology companies as part of a new “Tech Prosperity Deal”.
- A detailed breakdown of Microsoft’s $30 billion commitment, including its plans to build the UK’s largest supercomputer in Essex in partnership with Nscale.
- NVIDIA’s pledge, along with its partners, to invest £11 billion to create ‘AI factories’ and the largest deployment of GPUs in Europe.
- The creation of “Stargate UK” by Nscale, OpenAI, and NVIDIA, including a new ‘AI Growth Zone’ in the north east of England.
- The pivotal role of UK-based neocloud provider Nscale in delivering the infrastructure for these projects.
The News: In a landmark announcement coinciding with President Trump’s state visit, the UK has secured more than $40 billion in investments from leading US technology companies to bolster its AI sector. The series of deals, unveiled as part of a new UK-US “Tech Prosperity Deal,” will see tech companies such as Microsoft, Google, NVIDIA, and Salesforce pour billions into the UK’s AI infrastructure, creating tens of thousands of jobs and solidifying the country’s position as the leader in European AI.
UK AI Sector Boosted by $40bn+ Investments from Microsoft, NVIDIA & Others
Analyst Take: The biggest announced investment is a $30 billion (£23 billion) commitment from Microsoft between 2025 and 2028 to expand the UK’s AI infrastructure and build the country’s largest supercomputer. Half of it is capital expenditure to build out the UK’s cloud and AI infrastructure, leading to the supercomputer, in partnership with Nscale, a UK-headquartered neocloud provider. The other $15 billion will be spent on ongoing operations in the UK, where Microsoft has 6,000 employees.
Microsoft will build the supercomputer at Nscale’s AI Campus in Loughton, Essex, just north east of London. The initial phase, expected to go live in Q1 2027, will house 23,040 NVIDIA GB300 GPUs, with a planned energy capacity of 50 megawatts (MW), which can be scaled up to 90MW. This will provide the immense processing power required for developing and training the next generation of large-scale AI models and will also play a significant role in delivering Microsoft’s Azure cloud services across the UK. The UK’s current largest supercomputer, Isambard-AI, built by HPE and NVIDIA, is located at the University of Bristol officially launched in July 2025.
NVIDIA is also making a significant investment in the UK, where it has been operating for 19 years already. NVIDIA and its ecosystem of partners, including Coreweave and Nscale, pledge to invest £11 billion ($15 billion) to establish ‘AI factories’ in the UK. This will involve the deployment of up to 120,000 advanced GPUs by the end of 2026, marking the largest AI infrastructure rollout in the country’s history and means the UK will have Europe’s largest deployment of GPUs.
And the UK is getting its own Stargate project, with Nscale, OpenAI and NVIDIA working together to establish Stargate across a range of sites in the UK, including a new ‘AI Growth Zone’ – an area earmarked for data centers – at Cobalt Park, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne in the north east of England. Stargate UK will start with OpenAI using 8,000 GPUs in Q1 2026 rising to a potential 31,000 GPUs eventually.
Nscale’s rise to prominence is quite something, given the company has only raised $185m in total, including a series A $155m in December 2024. Nscale emerged for Norway’s Arkon Energy, which ran data centers in part to mine bitcoins. As part of a broader global plan to deploy 300,000 NVIDIA GPUs, the company, which started in Norway but is now headquartered in London, is deploying up to 58,640 NVIDIA GPUs across the country. In addition to the Microsoft and Stargate UK projects, Nscale will also deploy 4,600 NVIDIA GB300 GPUs in partnership with NVIDIA DGX Cloud, which will support AI developers across the UK.
Other announcements include Google opening a data center that cost £5 billion Waltham Cross, just north of London and Salesforce pledging to invest $6bn in its UK business through 2030. The UK is Salesforce’s second-largest market outside the US.
The Politics
However, while the headline figures are substantial, not all of the investment represents entirely new money. The $6 billion from Salesforce, for instance, is an extension of a previous five-year, $4 billion commitment made in 2023. Similarly, Google’s £5 billion investment is linked to the opening of its new data center in Waltham Cross, a project that has been in development since a planning application was first submitted in 2018. Despite this, the deal includes enormous new commitments that could dramatically reshape the UK’s technological landscape.
Of course, the timing is no coincidence, given Trump’s presence in the country, his second state visit. The announcements have been hailed as a “generational step change” in the UK-US relationship by Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who said the investments are a vote of confidence in the UK’s leadership in AI and technology. The “Tech Prosperity Deal” is designed to foster cooperation in rapidly growing technologies, including AI, quantum computing, and nuclear energy, with the goal of accelerating advancements, creating jobs, and improving the lives of citizens in both countries. What isn’t entirely clear is whether the UK government has had to make any concessions to secure this investment, such as tax breaks or potential watering down of the UK’s Online Safety Act. More details on that may emerge later this week.
What to Watch:
- The most immediate factor to watch is whether details emerge about concessions the UK government may have offered to secure these investments, such as tax incentives or regulatory adjustments to legislation like the Online Safety Act. Any such revelations could alter the public and political perception of the deal.
- Successfully deploying 120,000 advanced GPUs and a 50-90MW supercomputer is a monumental task. Watch for potential bottlenecks in the energy grid, supply chains for specialized hardware, and the availability of a skilled workforce to build and operate these ‘AI factories’.
- Impact on the UK Tech Ecosystem: While the investment is focused on US tech giants, its ripple effect on UK-based AI startups and scale-ups will be critical. The key question is whether this infrastructure empowers domestic innovation or if the sheer scale of the US players overshadows local competitors. The success of developer access programs, such as the NVIDIA DGX Cloud partnership with Nscale, will be an important indicator.
See more on the UK government’s website about the first-ever UK-US tech agreement.
Disclosure: Futurum is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of Futurum as a whole.
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Author Information
Nick Patience is VP and Practice Lead for AI Platforms at The Futurum Group. Nick is a thought leader on AI development, deployment, and adoption - an area he has researched for 25 years. Before Futurum, Nick was a Managing Analyst with S&P Global Market Intelligence, responsible for 451 Research’s coverage of Data, AI, Analytics, Information Security, and Risk. Nick became part of S&P Global through its 2019 acquisition of 451 Research, a pioneering analyst firm that Nick co-founded in 1999. He is a sought-after speaker and advisor, known for his expertise in the drivers of AI adoption, industry use cases, and the infrastructure behind its development and deployment. Nick also spent three years as a product marketing lead at Recommind (now part of OpenText), a machine learning-driven eDiscovery software company. Nick is based in London.
