Google pledge £5B to Britain – but concerns raised over mooted UK-US tech deal (news.sky.com)

Google has pledged £5 billion of investment into the UK over the next two years to expand data‑centre capacity and fund capital expenditure, R&D and engineering for AI services, coinciding with the opening of a new Waltham Cross data centre. The package — which Google says will include “pioneering” AI research via DeepMind focused on science and healthcare, plus improvements to cybersecurity — is expected to help grow the UK AI economy and create about 8,250 jobs annually across UK businesses. The announcement comes alongside reports of parallel multibillion‑dollar investments from OpenAI and Nvidia and is being unveiled during diplomatic engagements tied to a UK‑US tech agenda. But the deal has prompted political pushback and policy concerns: Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey called it a “Silicon Valley stitch‑up,” urging Parliament to scrutinise any UK‑US tech arrangements and warning that tax incentives or deregulation could be traded for commercial commitments, with potential implications for online child protections and domestic regulatory sovereignty. For the AI/ML community the investment signals big boosts to compute and talent in the UK—accelerating model training, applied research (healthcare, science) and cloud/edge deployments—while raising questions about governance, data jurisdiction, and how public interest safeguards will be preserved as infrastructure and R&D scale rapidly.