CoreWeave, a prominent American AI infrastructure group, is injecting an initial £1 billion into Britain, marking the third substantial investment in the UK's rapidly expanding AI sector.
The company has inaugurated a London office to function as its European headquarters and is launching two data centres in the capital this year, with intentions to broaden its presence further by 2025.
Wayve, a British company specialising in driverless cars, secured $1 billion from Softbank, Nvidia, and Microsoft, while San Francisco's Scale AI revealed intentions to establish its European headquarters in Britain.
Rishi Sunak, with a declared goal of positioning the UK as a global leader in regulating and innovating technology, hailed the latest investment as a move that would "solidify the UK's status as an AI and tech powerhouse."
CoreWeave, with a recent valuation of $19 billion, operates as a cloud service provider catering to businesses requiring substantial amounts of high-performance computer power, commonly referred to as "compute."
Though not widely recognized by the general public, it holds a prominent position within the tech sphere for its provision of access to Nvidia's sought-after AI computer processors, known as graphics processing units (GPUs). The demand for these GPUs is so significant that Elon Musk once likened them to being "harder to obtain than drugs."
They are stored in data centres and their capacity can be rented by companies for power-hungry work, such as training large language models and running AI applications. CoreWeave’s founder, Michael Intrator, has dubbed the chips “the Maserati” of cloud infrastructure.
