US tech firms pour £30B into UK as Trump lands

LONDON — U.S. tech companies unveiled £31 billion of investments in Britain Tuesday, timed for the arrival of President Donald Trump on his second state visit to the country. 

OpenAI, Nscale and Nvidia announced a U.K. version of Stargate — a massive AI infrastructure scheme — with its first data centers slated to be located on the site of a former coal power station in Northumberland, north-east England. 

The U.K. government said Tuesday the site near Blyth would become an AI Growth Zone — areas of the country earmarked for AI data centers. It will also link to nearby Newcastle University and a business park. The government said the site could mean the addition of 5,000 new jobs in the region.    

Those data centers will be powered by Nvidia chips and the company said it would ship up to 120,000 advanced GPUs to British data centers in total, funded by investments from Microsoft, Nscale, OpenAI and CoreWeave. 

Around half of those GPUs will go to British data center firm Nscale, which is partnering with Microsoft to build Britain’s largest AI supercomputer in Loughton, Essex, using 23,000 Nvidia chips.

OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman said Stargate UK, which will bring 8,000 GPUs to the country, would “accelerate scientific breakthroughs, improve productivity, and drive economic growth.”

The biggest chunk of investment will come from Microsoft, which said it would invest £22 billion in the U.K. over the next four years. Microsoft said around half of that figure would go towards capital expenditures on AI infrastructure, while the rest would support the company's ongoing operations in the U.K., including in AI model development, its gaming division, and general product development.

“We're focused on British pounds, not empty tech promises,” Microsoft President Brad Smith said in a press conference Tuesday.

Fellow tech giant Google cut the ribbon on a new data center on Tuesday in Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire, and said it would commit to spend £5 billion in the U.K. over the next two years.

AI cloud computing company CoreWeave will also invest £1.5 billion in the U.K., which includes the expansion of a data center near Airdrie, North Lanarkshire, powered by renewable energy and using Nvidia chips. 

U.K. Tech Secretary Liz Kendall said: “This is a vote of confidence in Britain’s booming AI sector.” 

The flurry of investment comes ahead of the two countries signing a “Technology Prosperity Deal” Thursday, pledging closer co-operation on AI, quantum, space and nuclear energy. 

U.S. AI startup Scale AI will also invest more than £39 million in the U.K. over the next two years, expanding its European HQ in London and quadrupling its employees by the end of next year. Global asset manager BlackRock is putting £500 million into U.K. data centers, including £100 million for the expansion of a site west of London. Oracle, meanwhile, has reaffirmed a previously-announced $5 billion investment in the U.K.