TL;DRThe UK announced a £1.1bn AI Hardware Plan (including a £750M supercomputer for 2030), a £200M AI adoption package, AI legal assistants for courts, and the UK’s first Homelessness Data Lab at London Tech Week. The supercomputer is four years away and the Data Lab has no disclosed budget.
The UK government used London Tech Week to announce a £1.1 billion AI Hardware Plan and a £200 million AI Adoption package, alongside reforms that will put AI into the justice system and a new data lab aimed at preventing homelessness. The announcements represent the most concentrated burst of technology investment the current government has made.
Technology Secretary Liz Kendall unveiled the hardware plan, which backs British chip companies, funds a national supercomputer, and invests in the workforce needed to design and build AI hardware in the UK.
The hardware plan: £1.1 billion
£750 million will fund a new national AI supercomputer, intended to be one of the most advanced in the world when deployed in 2030. £150 million of that budget will be spent this summer on next-generation inference chips, creating an immediate commercial opportunity for British firms.
