A village in Oxfordshire will become a global tech hub rivalling Silicon Valley if government plans succeed.
Culham, population 453 at last count, has been designated as an AI Growth Hub as part of a bid to ‘turbocharge’ tech in the UK.
Keir Starmer announced last night that the government will invest massively in the sector to drive economic growth, taking on the current giants of the US and China and hoping to attract billions of pounds of investment.
The village near Abingdon is the first growth zone to be identified, and it is not merely a sleepy hamlet chosen randomly. It is also the headquarters of the UK Atomic Energy Authority, and hosts a lab for fusion research. This means it has the potential to provide the vast amounts of energy needed to power AI models.
Other zones will be announced as the plan continues, and all will be able to boast faster planning decisoins and access to unusually large amounts of energy.
As well as these growth zones, the government set out other areas where AI investment is already coming in.
In Liverpool, a new tech hub is planned by IT services provider Kyndryl. In Loughton, Essex, Nscale has signed a contract to build the largest UK sovereign AI data centre by 2026. And in Cardiff, Wales, Vantage Data Centres is working to build one of Europe’s largest data centre campuses.
Going further to entice companies to choose the UK, a National Data Library will be made available offering vast troves of public information to train AI models, such as NHS statistics and scans to train medical diagnostic models.
While this may seem optimistic to anyone who has tried to use the health service’s computer systems recently, the aim is to provide high quality, clean data to make the process of training AI models easier.
Dr Jonathan Aitken, a senior university teacher specialised in autonomous robotics at the University of Sheffield, told Metro the obvious places for more investment zones were places with access to large scale supercomputers.
These could include Bristol, Cambridge, the ‘cyber corridor’ in the North West and potentially Edinburgh, he said.
Regarding the need for large energy sources, he said: ‘Large resources are very power hungry and that is going to be one of the prime decisions for people in locating to these areas.
‘If that energy capacity is available, it’s almost the only place to find it, therefore it is going to become a hub because there is enough capacity on tap to run the models,’ he said.
He said he was hopeful about the investment plan as there is ‘definitely an opening’ and the is UK well placed due to its experience with high technology systems, especially regarding safety and security.
Following his speech at UCL East in London today, the prime minister said ‘posture really matters’ when it comes to the government’s approach to AI.
One posture was ‘defensive, inhibited and cautious’ with a focus on regulating the new tech, he said.
But he described himself as being in a second camp, saying: ‘The other posture is seeing it as a huge and fantastic opportunity that is going to transform lives.’
Sir Keir announced that three technology firms – Vantage Data Centres, Nscale and Kyndryl – would create more than 13,000 new jobs while building the UK’s new AI infrastructure.
He said there would be ‘teething problems’ but praised the potential, saying: ‘It can spot potholes quicker, speed up planning applications, reduce job centre form-filling, help with the fight against tax avoidance and almost halve the time that social workers spend on paperwork.’
If the government plan succeeds, AI could be an industry for this century in the same way coal and steel dominated the last.
But many will be concerned about the impact on jobs from increased automation, not to mention the possibility of it going rogue and terminating humanity.
Adopting AI technology will not just ‘lead to lots of job losses’, Sir Keir insisted.
He told BBC Radio 2’s Jeremy Vine show: ‘This will change the work that people do, but it won’t just lead to lots of job losses.
‘On the contrary today, because of the investment in AI we’ve announced – £14 billion of investment – that’s 12,000 jobs, a thousand of them announced today to be in the Liverpool area. These are brand new jobs.
‘So again, getting to the front of the queue on AI means that we get those job opportunities.’
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