Take Sam Altman’s royal UK visit with a pinch of salt

ON HIS UK trip to dine with King Charles III this week, US President Donald Trump is accompanied by Silicon Valley royalty: Nvidia chief executive officer Jensen Huang and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

Both were expected to highlight billions of dollars of investment in artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure, echoing similar jaunts to France and the Middle East, where the tech leaders have promised to help these countries establish greater “AI sovereignty”.

As Bloomberg columnist Lionel Laurent has pointed out, the term borders on meaningless when so many European businesses rely on American cloud companies.

There’s an impossibly wide gap between Britain and America on AI infrastructure: the chips, data centres and sophisticated software models that underpin most AI tools.

The US owns about 75 per cent of the world’s AI supercomputers, China has about 15 per cent, with the remaining 10 per cent distributed elsewhere. The UK holds around 3 per cent of world compute capacity – about 1.8 gigawatts (GW) – with ambitions to reach 6 GW by 2030. That would barely match the data-centre capacity of a single project by Meta Platforms, which is currently building a 5 GW server farm in Louisiana that Mark Zuckerberg says will be the size of Manhattan, or about 59.1 square kilometres.

Of course, Britain and other nations shouldn’t rely solely on US data centres to store their digital wealth; it’s prudent to build their own computing facilities as insurance to be able to operate normally amid a global market disruption, for instance. But there are different types of data centres. The more than £1 billion (S$1.74 billion) the government has pledged in public funding on expanding the country’s AI training capacity, for example, would be better spent elsewhere.

When it comes to the global race to build AI’s most powerful models, that ship has sailed. OpenAI, Alphabet’s Google, DeepSeek and Anthropic already dominate the market.

“At the frontier it’s going to be hard for anyone besides the US or China to be competitive,” says Keegan McBride, a senior policy adviser in emerging tech and geopolitics at the Tony Blair Institute, a non-profit organisation. “We’re starting to see the market question whether we need to continue to build out more (on) the training front.”

Britain should instead focus on building server facilities that run AI services, or “inference” in tech parlance. A good example is Google’s funding of a data centre 20 miles (32.2 km) north of central London, aimed at powering the company’s AI consumer and business services. Rather than try and match the US on infrastructure, Britain should utilise the expensive plumbing that Silicon Valley has already spent billions of dollars developing by building companies on top.

UK startups such as Synthesia, Poly.ai and Wexler.ai are examples of firms selling services that address specific needs for legal firms or training and marketing. 

The UK should also accelerate its efforts to open the spigots of cash from the well-heeled British finance industry to local startups.

Across Europe, pension funds allocate just 0.018 per cent of their assets to the venture capital firms that back new technology companies, according to research from Austrian venture capital firm Atomico. By comparison, American pension funds put an estimated 2 to 3 per cent into venture capital (VC), unlocking huge pools of capital for Silicon Valley to tap.

Britain’s Mansion House compact, in which the country’s leading pension funds promised to invest much more in VC, is a good start.

But it should move faster, push bigger commitments, and make sure pension money gets to ambitious UK startups, and not just big property or infrastructure deals.

Rather than chasing Silicon Valley’s lead on infrastructure, Britain should focus on making its finance sector work harder for homegrown tech.

Data-centre investments make for impressive headline numbers, but there’s little point trying to compete with America’s entrenched dominance in AI compute or hyping the number of jobs that will be created from servicing miles of server racks.

The UK, like other European nations, needs to leverage that infrastructure to create new firms – and spend more on them to fuel innovation for the longer term.