There was no shortage of praise between UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Jensen Huang, CEO of semiconductor giant Nvidia, during the opening panel of London Tech Week. Huang said it was “vital” to invest in the UK, where, in his view, the country’s research culture is one of its biggest assets.
The leader of the world’s most valuable company said the UK is in a “goldilocks circumstance”, given its access to a rich AI community and its position as the third-largest AI venture capital investor after the US and China.
The US CEO said the biggest factor holding the UK back was its lack of infrastructure, but he praised an earlier announcement from Starmer that the government would invest an extra £1bn ($1.4bn) to scale up the country’s computing capability by a factor of 20.
Starmer was pleased to hear Huang’s optimism, saying that Nvidia’s interest in the UK was “a vote of confidence”. The PM also announced in his opening keynote speech that the government would launch an initiative to train 7.5 million AI workers by 2030 and invest £187m in tech education.
Huang said Nvidia was ready to invest in the UK by launching an AI lab to help “start off the AI ecosystem and infrastructure”. Ahead of the CEO’s appearance with Starmer, Nvidia announced several partnerships with the UK.
Nscale, a British cloud computing provider, announced it would develop AI infrastructure with 10,000 Nvidia Blackwell graphics processing units by 2026. The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority also launched a “supercharged sandbox” with Nvidia, allowing banks and other organisations to experiment with AI products.
Starmer’s growth-focused government has been vocal about the role AI will play in the country’s future, reflected in the AI Opportunities Action Plan, published in January. While he acknowledged public fears about the onslaught of AI, particularly regarding job displacement, the PM said every part of society could benefit.
“By the end of this parliament we should be able to look every parent in the eye in every region in Britain and say, ‘look what technology can deliver for you’,” Starmer said.
Huang reflected this optimism, describing AI as “the great equaliser”, predicting every industry in the UK would eventually be a tech industry. He added that the chatbot aspect of large language models democratised technology, because there is no need to know a more complicated coding language anymore.
“The way you programme AI is like the way you programme a person,” he said.
