US Tech Giants Race to Spend Billions in UK AI Push (www.wired.com)

US tech giants this week announced a wave of multibillion-dollar commitments to build out UK AI infrastructure and R&D: Microsoft pledged $30 billion over four years (about two‑thirds of the announced total), Nvidia committed up to $15 billion for UK AI R&D through partners CoreWeave and Nscale, and Alphabet revealed a separate $6.8 billion AI investment. The trio—Nvidia, Nscale and OpenAI—also launched a joint venture called Stargate UK to boost “sovereign compute,” with OpenAI supplying up to 8,000 GPUs in Q1 2026 and potential scale to 31,000 GPUs. Microsoft says half its money will fund capital expansion (new data centers) and half will finance partner facilities; Nscale plans capacity expansion at sites including Cobalt Park inside a newly designated AI Growth Zone. Technically, these deals accelerate local hosting of large models, increase access to dense GPU clusters for training/inference, and aim to keep sensitive workloads inside UK jurisdiction—important for latency, data governance and industrial strategy. But the buildout intensifies existing constraints (power, land and cooling water) in the UK’s largest data‑center market and raises environmental and affordability concerns. Campaigners warn hyperscale centers will drive up electricity and water demand, challenging climate targets and prompting calls for tighter oversight of the trade‑offs between national AI capacity and local environmental impacts.