The UK government plans to spend £1 billion ($1.36bn) scaling up the nation's compute power "by a factor of 20," Prime Minister Keir Starmer said.

Starmer also reiterated his promise to improve planning regulations for data centers, as he kicked off a UK tech week alongside Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

The Prime Minister called the investment "a huge increase in the size of Britain’s AI engine," although no specifics were shared on how the funds will be spent. The twenty-fold target was previously set for 2030.

"It means we can be an AI maker, not just an AI taker," he said. "More importantly, it means we have the digital infrastructure we need to make sure AI improves our public services."

He added: "We are going to build more labs, more data centers - and we’re going to do it much, much more quickly. Our Planning and Infrastructure Bill, going through Parliament right now, is a real game-changer."

Alongside Starmer's comments, GPU and AI giant Nvidia said that it would invest in the country. It said it had scored deals with cloud provider Nscale to deploy 10,000 Blackwell GPUs by the end of 2026 and with Nebius for 4,000.

Nvidia is part of the first UK Sovereign AI Industry Forum, with other founding members including Babcock, BAE Systems, BT, National Grid, and Standard Chartered.

“The UK is in a Goldilocks circumstance,” Nvidia CEO Huang said. “You can’t do machine learning without a machine - and so the ability to build these AI supercomputers here in the UK will naturally attract more startups.”

He pointed to the nation's rich history of startups, continuing: “The ecosystem is really perfect for takeoff - it’s just missing one thing," with that being sovereign AI infrastructure.

DCD understands Huang traveled to the UK last Friday to negotiate the investment, and is set to head to France for similar European commitments.