US decacorn CoreWeave has pledged to invest £1bn in UK compute infrastructure in the latest boost to British AI.
Valued at $19bn, CoreWeave is a specialised cloud services provider for compute-intensive businesses.
The New York-headquartered company recently opened an office in London as the base of its European operations. CoreWeave has now announced plans to open two data centres in London.
Speaking to The Times, CoreWeave chief business officer Mike Mattacola said picking the UK for infrastructure investment was an “easy decision”.
“We think it’s enough to get compute into the market, stimulate the market and get people what they need,” Mattacola said.
“I definitely think there’s a lot of opportunities to expand the footprint and the infrastructure in the UK quite quickly.”
This week Wayve, a London-based AI software developer for autonomous vehicles, secured a £1.05bn funding round from SoftBank, NVIDIA and Microsoft.
Also this week, Silicon Valley unicorn Scale AI announced its plans to open a London office in its first international expansion.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak responded to the announcements saying: “It’s another vote of confidence in the UK’s economy and status as a science superpower and we are determined to ensure AI helps deliver a brighter future for the next generation.”
