Is the UK government getting too close to Big Tech?

The “circus” of Donald Trump’s state visit this week might make the technology pact between the US and the UK “easy to miss”, said Politico. But it is “impossible to ignore” the “technology heavyweights” among the US president’s entourage – including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Blackstone chief executive Stephen Schwarzman, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

Trump and Keir Starmer have agreed a tech industry partnership, backed by Nvidia and OpenAI, which will see top US firms, including Microsoft, pledge to invest billions in the UK’s artificial intelligence infrastructure. David Hogan, vice president for enterprise at AI chip maker Nvidia, told reporters his company’s own £11 billion injection would help “make the UK an AI maker, not an AI taker”.

Starmer’s government has hailed the pact as “tech prosperity deal”. But critics say it makes the UK ever more reliant on US tech firms. Britain risks being “a kind of vassal state, technologically”, picking up “sloppy seconds from Silicon Valley”, said Nick Clegg, Meta’s former vice president of global affairs.

What did the commentators say?

The UK-US deal involves “big numbers”, said The Guardian. Microsoft will invest £22 billion in cloud and AI infrastructure, as well as in a planned supercomputer in Loughton, Essex, in what it calls “a major commitment to the UK”.

As part of a data centre development project focused in the northeast of England, OpenAI will provide access to its AI tools and technology, Nvidia will offer the chips that power the models, and the UK government will supply the energy, sources told the Financial Times. There has been an “explosion” of such deals between Nvidia and other governments across Europe and Asia that have “proven receptive” to the company’s argument that developing national AI infrastructure is “critical”. When the Nvidia CEO met Starmer in June, he “warned that the UK lacked the digital infrastructure needed to give it an edge in the race to build its national AI industry”.

This notion of AI sovereignty “borders on meaningless” because so many businesses already “rely on American cloud companies”, said Bloomberg’s Parmy Olson. “The US owns about 75% of the world’s AI supercomputers, China has about 15%, with the remaining 10% distributed elsewhere.” The UK can only boast 3% of “world compute capacity” – an “impossibly wide gap” to bridge.

The UK government has also announced a £400 million deal for defence and intelligence services with Google Cloud. “The public deserves to understand who really benefits from these partnerships and what the return will be for taxpayers in years to come,” Gaia Marcus, director of the Ada Lovelace Institute think tank, told Politico.

When Technology Secretary Peter Kyle announced an earlier partnership with OpenAI in the summer, he said it would “support the UK’s goal to build sovereign AI in the UK”. But he failed to explain “exactly how putting more key digital infrastructure in the hands of a US tech giant” will do so, said Donald Campbell in Byline Times. Binding the UK into deals with Google and OpenAI “not only opens up our data to train their tools, but will force us to be a rule-taker from Silicon Valley, with little agency over our own digital future”.

The US tech companies are “working with Trump” to advance a “distinctly ‘America first’ agenda” in which dominance is secured by rolling out US AI products across the world. This is about “locking in as many countries as possible to US tech infrastructure and products, so that they are under control of those businesses and, by extension, their government – with the gap between the former and the latter growing narrower by the day”.

What next?

The AI plans are likely to raise concerns, said The Guardian, about the UK’s “under-pressure water supplies”, as huge amounts of water are needed to cool down energy-intensive data centres.

Meanwhile, European states and the European Commission are “talking about how to start moving away from US tech dominance, and the overwhelming control of cloud computing” by US firms, said Campbell. “The contrast with the UK is stark.” Government ministers are, at best, “burying their heads in the sand. At worst, they’re suffering from Stockholm Syndrome – enthusiastically embracing the crushing grip of the tech giants.”