Tech firms commit £6.3bn to UK data infrastructure

Four US tech firms have committed to invest £6.3bn in the UK’s data infrastructure. The investments from CyrusOne, ServiceNow, Cloud HQ and CoreWeave, announced as part of the government’s International Investment Summit, will take the total investment in UK data centres to more than £25bn since July 2024. CloudHQ is to develop a £1.9bn data centre campus in Didcot, Oxfordshire. The hyper-scale data centre is currently in development and will help meet the UK’s growing demand for AI and machine learning. It will create 1,500 jobs during construction and 100 permanent jobs once fully operational. Global AI platform and software leader ServiceNow also confirmed its commitment to the UK market, with plans to invest £1.1bn into its UK business over the next five years. The investment will not only support the future development of AI in the UK, expanding its data centres with Nvidia GPUs for local processing data, but also take up office space as the company significantly grows into employee base beyond its current headcount of 1,000 employees. CyrusOne, a leading global data centre developer headquartered in the US, announced its plans to expand its investment into the UK to £2.5bn. Subject to planning permission, the projects should be operational by Q4 2028 and are expected to create more than 1,000 jobs. CoreWeave also confirmed £750m to support the next generation of AI cloud infrastructure.  Building on its £1bn investment announced in May and the opening of its European headquarters in London, at Connexion House, E1, CoreWeave said it will invest a further £750m in the UK to support the demand for AI infrastructure. The investments follow Blackstone committing to invest £10bn in the North East last month, and Amazon Web Services announcing plans to invest £8bn in building, maintaining and operating data centres in the UK over the next five years.  Secretary of state for science, innovation and technology Peter Kyle said: “Tech leaders from all over the world are seeing Britain as the best place to invest with a thriving and stable market for data centres and AI development. “Data centres power our day-to-day lives and boost innovation in growing sectors like AI. This is why only last month, I took steps to class UK data centres as critical national infrastructure, giving the industry the ultimate reassurance the UK will always be a safe home for their investment. “Today’s drumbeat of investment is a vote of confidence in Britain and our approach to work with business to deliver sustained growth for all.” Image © HOLLIE ADAMS/POOL/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock