AMD Committed Up to £2bn and Nebius £1.7bn, As Britain Bids to Keep the AI Build-Out and Its Startups

Prime Minister Keir Starmer kicked off the keynotes with a new national AI compute strategy, including £400mn to buy specialist AI chips and expand the country’s computing capacity, part of a push he framed around keeping British firms able to “start here, scale here and stay here”.

AMD committed up to £2bn over five years, backing high-performance computing with the University of Cambridge and Imperial College and taking direct stakes in UK startups, with chief executive Lisa Su on stage to announce it.

Nebius pledged around £1.7bn to build out UK AI capacity, funding three new deployments of Nvidia infrastructure that will reach 65 megawatts by 2027 and expanding its London R&D hub.

Sadiq Khan, London’s mayor, added a pointedly different commitment: £12mn to help the city’s small businesses actually adopt AI, through readiness checks and mentoring, rather than build it. The Prince of Wales is due to appear later in the week, tying technology to his Homewards anti-homelessness initiative.

The backdrop is a UK tech sector that, by Tech Nation’s count, is now worth £1.2tn, with British AI startups raising more than £8.2bn in venture capital in the first half of 2026 alone, close to half of all European tech investment by the prime minister’s reckoning. Europe’s IT spending is forecast to grow 8.2 per cent this year to $1.3tn, its fastest in half a decade.

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