UK aims to build homegrown challenger to OpenAI

The UK is looking to create a homegrown competitor to OpenAI and significantly enhance its national computing infrastructure as part of Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s plan to position the country as a global leader in artificial intelligence.

Starmer is set to visit Bristol, England, on Monday to announce the pledge, which follows work done by British tech investor Matt Clifford to establish an “AI Opportunities Action Plan.” The plan aims to help the U.K. take advantage of the potential of AI,News.Az reports, citing foreign media.

The government is primarily seeking to expand data center capacity across the U.K. to boost developers of powerful AI models which rely on high-performance computing equipment hosted in remote locations to train and run their systems.

A target of increasing “sovereign,” or public sector, compute capacity in the U.K. by twentyfold by 2030 has been set. As part of that pledge, the government will begin opening access to the AI Research Resource, an initiative aimed at bolstering U.K. computing infrastructure.

Starmer’s administration last year canceled £1.3 billion of taxpayer-funded spending commitments towards two significant computing initiatives in order to prioritize other fiscal plans. The projects, an AI Research Resource and a next-generation “exascale” supercomputer, were pledges were made under Starmer’s predecessor, Rishi Sunak.

Sovereign AI has become a hot topic for policymakers, particularly in Europe. The term refers to the idea that technologies critical to economic growth and national security should be built and developed in the countries people are adopting them in.

To further bolster Britain’s computing infrastructure, the government also committed to setting up several AI “growth zones,” where rules on planning permission will be relaxed in certain places to allow for the creation of new data centers.

Meanwhile, an “AI Energy Council” formed of industry leaders from both energy and AI will be set up to explore the role of renewable and low-carbon sources of energy, like nuclear.

It comes as tech giants like Amazon, Microsoft and Google are investing hundreds of millions of dollars in small modular reactors (SMR) to provide nuclear energy for the data centers that power their AI systems.

News.Az