Britain’s Technology Secretary Peter Kyle has confirmed that four major US tech companies have pledged to invest £6.3 billion ($8.2 billion) in UK data centers.
Describing it in a press release as a “vote of confidence,” Kyle says the decision for CyrusOne, ServiceNow, Cloud HQ and CoreWeave to plough billions into the UK’s AI efforts will help the nation become the leader in digital innovation and AI that it hopes for.
Announced at the International Investment Summit, the multibillion-dollar sum brings the total investment in UK data centers under the current government to more than £25 billion.
US tech giants will invest in UK data centers
The investments will help fund new data centers that will provide the compute and storage for Britain to “train and deploy the next generation of AI technologies.”
Kyle commented: “Tech leaders from all over the world are seeing Britain as the best place to invest with a thriving and stable market for data centres and AI development.”
Washington DC-headquartered CloudHQ’s plans include a £1.9 billion data center in Didcot, Oxfordshire. Set to bring 1,500 jobs during construction and 100 permanent roles when operational, it will help meet the UK’s growing demand for AI and ML.
ServiceNow has committed to investing £1.15 billion over five years to expand its data centres with Nvidia GPUs and support new office space as the growing company.
CyrusOne’s cash injection will total £2.5 billion, with CoreWeave adding an extra £750 million on top of previous investments by Blackstone (£10 billion) and AWS (£8 billion).
The news comes just weeks after Kyle classified data centers as ‘Critical National Infrastructure’, indicative of the extra support they would receive from the government in the event of critical incidents.
The investment also follows US private equity firm Blackstone’s £10 billion ($13 billion) investment to build AI data centers in the North East of England.