UK is going to be ‘AI superpower’, says Nvidia boss as he invests £500m

Jensen Huang, the co-founder and chief executive of the US AI chip maker Nvidia, has predicted “the UK is going to be an AI superpower” as he announced a new £500m investment in a British firm.

Huang, who is due to join Donald Trump at Wednesday night’s state banquet with the king, said he was taking an equity stake in NScale, a UK cloud computing company, and predicted it would earn revenues of up to £50bn over the next six years.

“We’re here to announce that the UK is going to be an AI superpower,” he told a press conference in London.

Huang cited as evidence of Britain’s potential its universities and several companies founded in the UK, ranging from the AI giant DeepMind to the driverless car startup Wayve. “You just don’t appreciate it. Your universities. Come on. You’re too humble,” he said.

The semiconductor boss spoke as China moved to ban its biggest AI firms from buying Nvidia chips, in a sign of the growing geopolitical battle to gain dominance in AI.

Huang said he was “disappointed” at reports that Beijing was bringing in the ban, adding: “It is safer for the world that China and the United States collaborate in AI, and Chinese researchers collaborate in AI than to isolate.”

He said Nvidia was selling 120,000 graphics processing units to the UK as part of an investment amounting to £11bn, with 70% of that cost coming from computing and networking, including the chips, and 30% going on land, power and the structures of the data centre.

Huang said the combined additional computing power would be “approximately 100 times the performance of the fastest supercomputer in the UK right now, the Isambard AI supercomputer [in Bristol]”.

He also stepped into a row over how AI companies treat artists’ copyrighted material, which has been used wholesale to train AI systems, saying: “Artists should have the ability to monetise their creation … we have to find ways for them to continue to do so.”

Elton John and Mick Jagger were among a swathe of high-profile artists who this week complained Labour had failed to defend artists’ basic rights by blocking attempts to force artificial intelligence firms to reveal what copyrighted material they have used in their systems.

Huang’s upbeat statement about Britain’s AI superpower future was tempered by a warning that “a challenge” remained to secure enough electricity to fuel the necessary wave of power-hungry data factories. He said nuclear power and gas turbine power stations would be needed.

He also urged the UK to develop its own AI systems, despite the huge wave of US investment from Microsoft, Google and OpenAI announced this week.

“Every country should create its own AI … I think the UK will have to do the same. The data belongs to you. It belongs to your people. It’s created by your people, your companies. And you should be able to … transform that data into your national interest,” he said.