Challenger bank Starling is planning to train an AI model using UK-based sovereign cloud infrastructure from Civo.

Starling will use Nvidia hardware to train a transactional foundation model (TFM) based on its proprietary data from more than 15 billion anonymized transactions. It is hoped this will give Starling greater insight into the behavior and needs of customers and, in time, form a "Starling Intelligence" layer to build new services.

By running the training workloads on Civo's sovereign cloud, the company will be following the recommendations made in the UK Government's Financial Services AI Adoption Plan, which warns against relying on a small number of global providers.

“We’ve made huge strides with our proprietary AI tools, launching the UK’s first agentic AI financial assistant and rolling out new features every week. Now we want to connect these tools with a single intelligence layer that’s trained entirely on the specific needs of our customers,” said Harriet Rees, group CIO at Starling and UK Government AI champion for financial services. “We also want to take a leadership role in the development of home-grown cloud infrastructure, which is essential to European companies’ ability to diversify their suppliers and reduce concentration risk.”

“AI will only deliver lasting value for the UK economy if it's built on secure, resilient, sovereign infrastructure," said Mark Boost, CEO of Civo. "Starling is leading the financial sector by training and hosting its Transactional Foundation Model on a homegrown cloud. Pairing Nvidia compute with Civo's UK sovereign cloud shows that banks don't have to trade performance or innovation for control of their data, or depend on a handful of global providers.”

In addition to using Nvidia GPUs, Starling will use the Nvidia Transaction Foundation Model developer blueprint, including Nvidia CUDA-X libraries for GPU-accelerated data processing and Nvidia NeMo AutoModel for model training.

Earlier this month, Civo announced it was planning to roll out 40 Edge data centers across the UK starting with an 8MW facility in Hertfordshire. The company said that the Edge data centers would be used to power sovereign AI compute in the UK - including Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 systems.