Microsoft pens $15B love letter to the UK with 23,000 Nvidia GPUs attached (www.theregister.com)

Microsoft has pledged a headline $15 billion of a planned $30 billion 2025–2028 spend to expand cloud and AI infrastructure in the UK, including a partnership with Nscale to build what it calls the country's largest supercomputer with more than 23,000 Nvidia GPUs (Nvidia has suggested the figure is north of 24,000). The move joins other recent commitments — Nvidia’s own investments and CoreWeave’s £1.5 billion GPU deployment in Scotland — and follows Microsoft’s earlier £2.5 billion, three‑year UK investment. The deals signal a major influx of high‑density accelerator capacity aimed at accelerating AI model training and large‑scale inference for UK industry, research and government customers. The investment is significant because it rapidly boosts domestic access to cutting‑edge compute, potentially lowering latency and cost for UK AI deployment and strengthening local R&D. But it also crystallises policy and technical tensions: questions about data sovereignty (Microsoft has admitted it can’t fully guarantee it), strains on grid capacity and planning rules, environmental impacts, and worries about foreign control of critical digital infrastructure. For the AI/ML community this means more available GPU cycles and enterprise services, plus opportunities for applied research — yet also a reminder that compute scale alone won’t resolve governance, supply‑chain and energy challenges around national AI strategy.