All in on US big tech: why the UK's "£150B AI investment" may never arrive (euaipolicymonitor.substack.com)

The US‑UK “Tech Prosperity Deal” announced during the US President’s state visit promises up to £150bn of US investment in AI, quantum and supporting infrastructure, plus an AI “growth zone” in North East England with fast‑tracked planning and energy support. Much of the headline figure is aspirational: Blackstone accounts for roughly £90bn tied to datacenter infrastructure, while pledges from OpenAI, Microsoft, Nvidia, Google and Palantir are inconsistent and largely in planning stages. Major announced projects appear to be datacentres from Microsoft and Google, not immediate cash deployments. The deal signals a strategic shift toward dependence on US cloud and hardware providers rather than home‑grown sovereign compute. Technical and economic risks are material: large datacenter buildouts demand huge power (orders of ~1.1 GW for major sites), can strain grids, divert renewable capacity, and may not produce substantial local employment. The rise of “neocloud” GPU providers like Nscale—backed by Nvidia, credit markets and hyperscaler offtake—exposes fragility: GPUs are used as loan collateral yet depreciate fast, creating debt and demand‑driven vulnerabilities that resemble past speculative bubbles. The policy takeaway is that without clearer contractual conditions, energy planning and public safeguards, the pledge may never fully materialize and could increase UK exposure to US tech interests and economic risk.