Britain wants to become global AI leader, build domestic OpenAI rival

LONDON — The U.K is looking to build a homegrown challenger to OpenAI and drastically increase national computing infrastructure, as Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government sets its sights on becoming 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.

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.

The last major initiative the U.K. government proposed was to create homegrown AI “champions” of a similar scale to American tech giants responsible for the foundational AI models that power today’s generative AI tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Britain plans to use the AI growth zones and a newly established National Data Library to connect public institutions — such as universities — to enhance the country’s ability to create “sovereign” AI models which aren’t reliant on Silicon Valley.

It’s worth highlighting that the U.K. faces serious challenges in its bid to create an effective OpenAI alternative. For one, several entrepreneurs in the country have bemoaned funding challenges that make it difficult for startups in the country to raise the kind of cash available to AI success stories.

Many U.K. founders and venture capitalists have called for the country’s pension funds to allocate a greater portion of their portfolios toward riskier, growth-focused startups — a reform the government has committed to pushing previously.

“In the U.K., there’s $7 trillion in this pocket,” Magnus Grimeland, CEO and founder of venture capital firm Antler, told CNBC in an interview last year. “Imagine if you take just 5% of that and allocate it to innovation — you solve the problem.”

U.K. tech leaders have nevertheless generally praised the government’s AI action plan. Zahra Bahrololoumi, Salesforce’s U.K. boss, told CNBC the plan is a “forward-thinking strategy,” adding she’s encouraged by the government’s “bold vision for AI and emphasis on transparency, safety and collaboration.”

Chintan Patel, Cisco’s chief technology officer in the U.K., said he’s “encouraged” by the action plan. “Having a clearly defined roadmap is critical for the UK to achieve its ambition to become an AI superpower and a leading destination for AI investment,” he said.

Britain doesn’t yet have formal regulations for AI. Starmer’s government has previously said it plans to draw up legislation for AI — but details remain thin.

Last month, the government announced a consultation on measures to regulate the use of copyrighted content to train AI models.

More generally, the U.K. is pitching a differentiated regulatory regime from the EU following Brexit as a positive factor — meaning, it can introduce regulatory oversight for AI but in a way that’s less strict than the EU, which has taken a more hard-line approach to regulating the technology with its AI Act.