NVIDIA is doubling down on the United Kingdom’s AI ambitions, driving the largest infrastructure rollout in the country’s history while also backing efforts to safeguard its oldest languages with sovereign AI models.
The company, working with CoreWeave, Microsoft, and U.K. cloud provider Nscale, will build AI factories by 2026 equipped with 120,000 Blackwell Ultra GPUs and up to £11 billion in data center investments. These facilities will power advanced AI systems, including OpenAI’s GPT-5, while enabling Nscale’s global expansion with 300,000 Grace Blackwell GPUs. Microsoft and Nscale are also partnering on what is set to be the U.K.’s most powerful supercomputer in Loughton, featuring more than 24,000 Grace Blackwell Ultra GPUs to bolster Azure services.
In parallel, the sovereign AI push is extending into cultural preservation. The UK-LLM project, originally launched as BritLLM and led by University College London, has introduced a new AI model based on NVIDIA’s open-source Nemotron framework that can reason in both English and Welsh. With about 850,000 speakers in Wales today, the effort is aligned with the Welsh government’s Cymraeg 2050 initiative to grow the number of Welsh speakers to one million.
Built in collaboration with Bangor University and trained on the £225 million Isambard-AI supercomputer at the University of Bristol, the model draws on translated Nemotron datasets with over 30 million entries. NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips were used to accelerate training, while NIM microservices handled dataset translation and deployment.
By tying large-scale industrial infrastructure to minority-language AI models, the U.K. is positioning itself not only as a hub for scientific and economic growth but also as a leader in culturally inclusive AI development.
