Britain and the United States have agreed a know-how pact to increase ties in AI, quantum computing and civil nuclear vitality, with high U.S. companies led by Microsoft pledging 31 billion kilos ($42 billion) in UK investments.
The “Tech Prosperity Deal” is a part of U.S. President Donald Trump’s second state visit to Britain, which can embrace a day of pomp at Windsor Castle on Wednesday, hosted by King Charles and the royal household.
Britain mentioned the pact included joint efforts to develop AI fashions for healthcare, increase quantum computing capabilities and streamline civil nuclear initiatives. It added that it might assist financial progress, scientific analysis and vitality safety in each nations.
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British Prime Minister Keir Starmer mentioned the deal had the potential to form the way forward for hundreds of thousands of individuals on either side of the Atlantic, and ship progress and safety.
The U.S. is Britain’s single largest nation buying and selling accomplice, and its large tech firms have already invested billions of {dollars} of their UK operations.
Starmer, below strain to reverse years of weak financial progress, now desires to pitch Britain as a vacation spot for additional funding by choosing the sunshine contact regulation favoured by the United States in areas resembling AI, as opposed to the extra interventionist method of the European Union.
The Trump administration has criticised European on-line security legal guidelines and digital taxes, together with these in Britain, however they weren’t a part of the discussions over the pact.
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Under the offers introduced, chipmaker Nvidia mentioned it might deploy 120,000 graphics processing models throughout Britain – its largest rollout in Europe to date.
It is working to deploy up to 60,000 Grace Blackwell Ultra chips with UK-based Nscale, which can accomplice OpenAI in a UK leg of the U.S. firm’s large Stargate venture and tie-up with Microsoft to set up Britain’s largest AI supercomputer.
Microsoft mentioned it might make investments 22 billion kilos in whole to increase cloud and AI infrastructure in addition to within the supercomputer, which can be in Loughton, north-east London.
Satya Nadella, chair and CEO of Microsoft, mentioned it wished to make sure that America remained a trusted and dependable tech accomplice for Britain. Its president, Brad Smith, mentioned relations had improved vastly because the “dark days” earlier than the UK’s antitrust regulator dropped its opposition to Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard, saying he felt “enormously better”.
David Hogan, vice chairman for enterprise at Nvidia, instructed reporters the investments would “truly make the UK an AI maker, not an AI taker”.
Google introduced a 5 billion-pound funding, together with a brand new knowledge centre in Waltham Cross, north of London, and continued assist for AI analysis by way of its DeepMind venture.
Cloud computing agency CoreWeave mentioned its 1.5 billion pound backing would fund energy-efficient knowledge centres in partnership with Scottish agency DataVita, bringing its whole UK funding to 2.5 billion kilos.
Other companies asserting commitments embrace Salesforce , Scale AI, BlackRock, Oracle, Amazon Web Services and AI Pathfinder, with investments starting from lots of of hundreds of thousands to a number of billion kilos.
Published – September 17, 2025 09:57 am IST