In the money
Cash in chips
IF THE increasingly circular AI investment frenzy – in which big US players like chip giant Nvidia and ChatGPT developer OpenAI concentrate “compute” power in a few interlinked hands – should end badly, there will be repercussions for the British end of the business too.
The largest part of what the government puts at £100bn worth of AI investment in the UK is the Stargate UK programme. Copying the name of a huge AI data centre project in the US, it brings together Nvidia, OpenAI and data centre builder NScale to create centres across the UK. These will use Nvidia’s in-demand “global processing unit” or GPU chips in Britain’s new “AI growth zones”, starting at Cobalt Park in Tyneside. A similar line-up is behind the UK’s biggest AI supercomputer at Loughton in Essex, where NScale and OpenAI investor Microsoft are teaming up and using 23,040 of Nvidia’s GB300 chips from 2027.