US-UK pact will create jobs (www.gov.uk)

The UK and US announced a landmark "Tech Prosperity Deal" at the US President’s State Visit that channels joint research and more than £31bn of new private investment from US tech firms into UK AI, quantum and data‑centre infrastructure. Major commitments include Microsoft’s largest-ever UK pledge (about $30bn/£22bn) to expand cloud infrastructure and build the country’s biggest supercomputer (over 23,000 advanced GPUs) with Nscale; NVIDIA’s plan to deploy 120,000 GPUs across the UK (including up to 60,000 Grace Blackwell Ultra GPUs via Nscale) and fund startups; OpenAI partnering on the Stargate UK project; Google’s £5bn two‑year expansion; and investments by CoreWeave, Salesforce, Scale AI, BlackRock and others. Arm’s semiconductor designs are integrated into NVIDIA’s Grace Blackwell chips, and quantum firms (Oxford Quantum Circuits, IonQ) are also scaling cross‑Atlantic R&D. For the AI/ML community this rapidly expands accessible training and inference capacity, creating UK GPU clusters and national-scale supercomputers that lower time and cost for large-model training, drug‑discovery pipelines and compute‑heavy research. Coupled with planned joint AI–quantum programs and a North East “AI Growth Zone” (potentially 5,000 jobs), the pact bolsters compute supply chains, onshore data centres, talent pipelines and startup funding—while the civil nuclear element promises energy stability to support energy‑intensive AI infrastructure. Practically, researchers and companies should expect faster access to high-density GPU fleets, deeper UK–US collaboration on model development and sharper competition for talent and standards.