public – private partnership. That may mean deploying public capital strategically to derisk early-stage infrastructure while providing longterm policy certainty to crowd in private investment.
Alphabet’ s £ 5bn( US $ 6.77bn) data centre in Waltham Cross is a promising start. Building on that momentum will require nurturing a broader ecosystem of domestic and international infrastructure providers capable of anchoring the UK’ s AI capabilities at scale.
Japan offers us a useful comparison. There, the government’ s policy ambitions have been backed by decisive spending: a US $ 65bn national plan announced in late 2024 for AI and semiconductor development, for example, as well as a US $ 677m partnership between SoftBank and OpenAI to build a new data centre in Osaka. Projects like these are expanding domestic computing capacity and signalling to international firms that Japan can host large-scale AI development.
144 June 2026