- Microsoft leads with about $30 billion investment across cloud, AI and data centres over the next four years.
- Nvidia, OpenAI, Google and others join, as the UK seeks to build home-grown AI resilience and compute power.
What happened: Microsoft, Nvidia and others pledge $40 billion to expand UK AI and data centre capacity
Research published by Capacity Media shows that Microsoft, Nvidia and several other major technology firms promise more than $40 billion in fresh investment in UK AI infrastructure and data centre capacity. Microsoft alone pledges roughly $30 billion over the next four years, with about half of that dedicated to new data centre builds and AI infrastructure. The company also plans to deploy some 23,000 advanced AI chips in UK facilities and is investing in a supercomputing hub in Loughton with the British firm Nscale.
Nvidia is contributing too: a commitment of around $14bn in partnership with hyperscale operators and providers such as Nscale and CoreWeave, including plans to install up to 120,000 Blackwell Ultra GPUs by end-2026. OpenAI is collaborating on the Stargate UK project at Cobalt Park, Newcastle, scaling from 8,000 GPUs initially to over 30,000 in later phases. Google is investing about $6.3 billion and building a new data centre at Waltham Cross, while Salesforce commits roughly $6 billion to expand its AI-driven cloud services in the UK.
Also read: Core Scientific to host CoreWeave’s AI servers in $1.6B deal
Also read: OpenAI secures $12B deal with CoreWeave
Why it is important
The UK is positioning itself as a global hub for AI, data centres, and sovereign compute capacity, as evidenced by this wave of investment. Having compute infrastructure domestically enables both public and private organisations to meet security and regulatory requirements in light of the growing concerns about digital sovereignty, latency, and supply chain resilience. These pledges also help the UK government achieve its objectives for skills development, job creation, and regional growth.
From an infrastructure perspective, such scale matters: deploying supercomputing hubs, large GPU clusters and data centres helps meet the surging demand from AI model training, cloud computing and generative AI applications. But delivering on these pledges will require overcoming practical hurdles—power supply, planning permissions, regulatory standards and ensuring environmental sustainability. If companies succeed, this could set a benchmark for what major tech investment in AI looks like in Europe.
