Map shows where AI hotspots will be in bid to make UK a ‘superpower’
A village in Oxfordshire will become a global tech hub rivalling Silicon Valley if government plans succeed.
Culham, population 453 at last count, has been designated as an AI Growth Hub as part of a bid to ‘turbocharge’ tech in the UK.
Keir Starmer announced last night that the government will invest massively in the sector to drive economic growth, taking on the current giants of the US and China and hoping to attract billions of pounds of investment.
To entice companies to choose the UK, a National Data Library will be made available offering vast troves of public information to train AI models, such as NHS statistics and scans to train medical diagnostic models.
While this may seem optimistic to anyone who has tried to use the health service’s computer systems recently, the aim is to provide high quality, clean data to make the process of training AI models easier.
The village near Abingdon is the first growth zone to be identified, but there will be others to be announced as the plan continues.
Such zones will benefit from faster planning permission and the energy connections companies need to power up AI.
Culham is not merely a sleepy hamlet chosen randomly: it is also the headquarters of the UK Atomic Energy Authority. And it is close to Oxford, one of the centres of tech research in the UK.
As well as these zones, the government set out other areas where AI investment is already coming in.
In Liverpool, a new tech hub is planned by IT services provider Kyndryl, which the government hopes will create up to 1,000 AI-related jobs over the next three years.
In Loughton, Essex, Nscale has signed a contract to build the largest UK sovereign AI data centre by 2026.
And in Cardiff, Wales, Vantage Data Centres is working to build one of Europe’s largest data centre campuses.
Sir Keir commended the Tories for setting up the AI Safety Institute, and urged the public to be ‘in absolutely no doubt we will make sure that this technology is safe’.
Following his speech at UCL East in London today, the PM said ‘posture really matters’ when it comes to the government’s approach to AI.
One posture was ‘defensive, inhibited and cautious’ with a focus on regulating the new tech, he said.
But he described himself as being in a second camp, saying: ‘The other posture is seeing it as a huge and fantastic opportunity that is going to transform lives.’
Sir Keir announced that three technology firms – Vantage Data Centres, Nscale and Kyndryl – would create more than 13,000 new jobs while building the UK’s new AI infrastructure.
He said there would be ‘teething problems’ but praised the potential, saying: ‘It can spot potholes quicker, speed up planning applications, reduce job centre form-filling, help with the fight against tax avoidance and almost halve the time that social workers spend on paperwork.’
If the government plan succeeds, AI could be an industry for this century in the same way coal and steel dominated the last.
But many will be concerned about the impact on jobs from increased automation, not to mention the possibility of it going rogue and terminating humanity.
Adopting AI technology will not just ‘lead to lots of job losses’, Sir Keir insisted.
He told BBC Radio 2’s Jeremy Vine show: ‘This will change the work that people do, but it won’t just lead to lots of job losses.
‘On the contrary today, because of the investment in AI we’ve announced – £14 billion of investment – that’s 12,000 jobs, a thousand of them announced today to be in the Liverpool area. These are brand new jobs.
‘So again, getting to the front of the queue on AI means that we get those job opportunities.’
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
For more stories like this, check our news page.