Britain Opens Floodgates To US Datacenter Investment

Just weeks after the British government designated datacenters as critical national infrastructure (CNI), a quartet of US tech firms have committed to the UK as the place to invest in their data facilities.

Timed to coincide with the government's International Investment Summit in London this week aimed at attracting overseas businesses to bring their money to Britain, the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology (DSIT) claimed the move takes the total investment in UK bit barns to over £25 billion ($32.5 billion) since the administration took office.

The four American companies involved are datacenter operators CyrusOne and CloudHQ, business workflow software company ServiceNow, and CoreWeave, a provider of cloud-hosted GPUs.

The quartet's investment will provide the UK with more compute power and data storage, DSIT said, so that Britain has the necessary infrastructure to train and deploy the next generation of AI technologies.

CoreWeave had already announced a £1 billion ($1.3 billion) investment into the rain-soaked British Isles back in May to set up its European headquarters here and build a pair of AI data shacks. According to DSIT, the company is stumping up an additional £750 million ($896 million) to "support the next generation of AI cloud infrastructure," but it isn't clear if this means additional datacenters or not.

Likewise, CloudHQ had already secured planning permission to build its £1.9 billion ($2.5 billion) campus in Didcot, Oxfordshire. The company claims it will help meet the country's growing demand for AI and machine learning, and that it will create 1,500 jobs during construction and 100 permanent jobs once fully operational.

That leaves ServiceNow, which says it plans to invest £1.15 billion ($1.5 billion) into its UK business over the next five years. This will go toward expanding its infrastructure with Nvidia GPUs and adding new office space as the company grows beyond its current headcount of 1,000 employees, it claims.

Finally, CyrusOne already has five datacenters located around London, but wants to expand its investment into the UK to £2.5 billion ($2.9 billion) over the coming years. The company says that its new projects are expected to create over 1,000 jobs and should be operational by Q4 2028, "subject to planning permission."

Of course, "subject to planning permission" doesn't have the same connotations it once had as datacenters are now designated as CNI, meaning that developers will largely be able to override any local objections to such facilities being built in a particular area, as The Register revealed last month.

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"Tech leaders from all over the world are seeing Britain as the best place to invest with a thriving and stable market for datacenters and AI development," Technology Secretary Peter Kyle said in a statement.

"Datacenters power our day-to-day lives and boost innovation in growing sectors like AI. This is why only last month, I took steps to class UK datacenters as Critical National Infrastructure, giving the industry the ultimate reassurance the UK will always be a safe home for their investment."

At the event, Prime Minister Keir Starmer also took part in a debate with former Google chief Eric Schmidt.

According to The Guardian, Schmidt urged Starmer to expand high-skilled immigration to help with AI, pointing out that a lot of "incredibly smart people" are now getting graduate degrees in AI, and the key is to either keep them in Britain or get them to move here from Europe.

We're sure that went down really well with Starmer, who has repeatedly said that Britain is not going back to the freedom of movement with the rest of Europe that existed before Brexit, and also that his government will cut immigration.

Meanwhile, Schmidt has been giving various venues the benefit of his wisdom on AI. Last week he told an AI summit in Washington DC that the world should just build as many AI datacenters as are needed because we aren't going to hit climate goals anyway. ®