Cloud vendor Civo is planning to roll out 40 Edge data centers across the UK, starting with an 8MW facility in Hertfordshire.

The company revealed plans earlier this month, stating that the Edge data centers would be used to power sovereign AI compute in the UK - including Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 systems.

The site in Hertfordshire will start with 8MW of capacity that is currently being fitted out and will scale to 38MW. The company has secured five further locations in Lancashire, Greater Manchester, London and Oxfordshire, which will offer a combined 150MW. The remaining sites are planned over the next three years.

“Britain has the talent. What it needs is infrastructure to match it,” said Mark Boost, CEO of Civo. “Policy alone will not deliver that. Compute, cooling and density have to exist physically, in this country, close to the organizations using them. Our distributed Edge network gives UK organizations sovereign, high-density infrastructure where the processing actually needs to happen, and gives international organizations a secure, compliant UK home for their services and data.”

The data centers will be built for direct-to-chip liquid cooling so as to support Nvidia Vera Rubin hardware.

Details of the data centers have not been provided, including whether they are self-built or leased from other providers.

However, earlier this year, Civo announced it was partnering with Era4, using the latter's data center network and Civo's cloud software to create a sovereign AI cloud platform in the UK. At that time, Era4 was said to have more than 40 brownfield and industrial sites in its portfolio across England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

Hertfordshire, located north of London, is not a particularly large data center market, though it is home to a Google data center that opened in September last year. Equinix is also developing a major data center project in the county.