Four US corporations have announced a combined £6.3 billion ($8.2 billion) investment in UK data centres, as Prime Minister Keir Starmer places technology at the focus of the government’s industrial policy at this week’s investment summit.
Cloud HQ, CyrusOne, CoreWeave, and ServiceNow revealed their planned investments at the UK government’s investment event in London.
The US-based company intends to extend its local presence by increasing office space, adding more employees, and localising data processing for its large language models (LLMs).
ServiceNow will upgrade its data centres in London and Newport with Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs) to better support LLMs in the United Kingdom.
This development is intended to fulfil the growing need for domain-specific AI models from British businesses and government organisations.
Technology Secretary Peter Kyle called the investments “a vote of confidence in Britain.” He stated, “Data centres fuel our daily lives and drive innovation in expanding fields such as AI.
“This is why, just last month, I took steps to classify UK data centres as Critical National Infrastructure, providing the industry with the greatest assurances that the UK will always be a safe haven for their investment.
CloudHQ, headquartered in Washington, DC, plans to build a new £1.9 billion data centre campus in Didcot, Oxfordshire, providing 1,500 construction jobs and 100 permanent positions once fully operating;
ServiceNow, a global AI platform and software leader, is to invest £1.15 billion in its UK business to support the future development of AI in the UK, expanding its data centres with Nvidia GPUs for local data processing.
CyrusOne, a data centre developer, proposes to invest £2.5 billion in the UK, with projects expected to be operational by Q4 2028, subject to planning permission.
CoreWeave, an AI hyperscaler, has committed £750 million to support its next-generation cloud infrastructure.
We earlier reported that a $1.8 billion investment to manufacture an organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display factory in Vietnam has been announced by Samsung Display, a major step towards strengthening its worldwide manufacturing capabilities.
