The briefing came one day before the House of Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee published a report warning that the UK "may not be able to count even on its allies for access to technologies" and calling for a clearer strategy on technology sovereignty. The committee's conclusions closely echo the Oxford Martin School research presented to parliamentarians during Evidence Week.
The UK hosts significant AI infrastructure, but it does not fully control enough of it to depend on when it matters most.
The researchers identify two strategic vulnerabilities.
The first is compute, the chips, servers and data centres used to train and run advanced AI systems. The UK hosts significant computing capacity, but much of it is owned or controlled by overseas companies. Their analysis shows that while the UK hosts around 4% of the world's AI computing capacity, it exercises sovereign control over only around 0.1% of it. In practice, that means access to computing power on UK soil could still depend on decisions made outside the UK.
"If those companies, or their governments, decided to restrict access, the physical servers in UK data centres could become unusable."
