This week a barrage of US-UK tech announcements punctuated the spectacle of the US president’s state visit. By the end of the week the tally stood at £150 billion in investment and Britain as an AI superpower! But before we get carried away, when Donald Trump is involved, it’s worth checking the numbers.
That £150 billion figure represents total US corporate commitments across multiple sectors over an undefined period. The actual AI-specific investment is £31 billion over four years, roughly £7.75 billion annually. Still significant. Microsoft’s £22 billion commitment is huge but spread across other forms of cloud infrastructure.
On the compute front, after some de-duplication, we estimate around 200,000 H100 (the most common GPU today) equivalent AI chip deployments were announced, and being cutting edge Nvidia chips, potentially multiplying our current low compute base by as much as 30x by 2028. Again significant, and also critical, but less impressive placed in global context. By 2028, the US will likely be in the multi-million H100 equivalents (Musk already has >200,000 alone) and China approaching the million range despite export controls. It’s at least enough to put the UK at the head of the chasing pack with the likes of France and the Gulf states. But what few were discussing were the energy demands. The Nscale Loughton campus in Essex alone will need 90MW. For context, that’s enough to power roughly 180,000 British homes. Getting half a gigawatt of new capacity online by 2028 requires not just money but political will to override planning objections, accelerate grid upgrades, and potentially build new substations.
But many worry more about the dependency we’re creating. This is American companies deploying American technology on British soil. Microsoft, OpenAI, and Nvidia control the stack from chips to models. As one telecoms analyst noted, Microsoft could withdraw services tomorrow under presidential order. When Trump says he wants the UK to “rely on the United States,” he means it. Where are the UK labs, where are the UK trained open-models, or AI chip designs where once we led the world?
The Nvidia catalyst fund backing companies like Wayve creates further dependencies. As Jensen Huang plays kingmaker, declaring the UK will birth a trillion-dollar AI company, he ensures it will run on Nvidia’s silicon, trained on Nvidia chips, dependent on Nvidia’s deployment of its vast AI capital.
Takeaways: This UK-US surge represents genuine compute progress if delivered, a 30x- increase in capacity isn’t trivial. Britain will have vital world-class infrastructure while remaining a tier below genuine AI superpowers. The UK has chosen speed over sovereignty, betting that being America’s premium AI outpost is the only viable option. Let’s hope trading autonomy for compute proves to be the wise choice.