It’s obviously a shame that OpenAI have paused some of their data centre investment here in the UK, and high energy prices need to be tackled for everybody - from household bills to heavy industry and AI.
But the UK, as is this case with many other countries, is not the natural home for many gigafactory-scale DCs aimed at huge training runs. While we must have this capacity to some degree ( and you can apply now to SovAI’s AIRR compute programme to access it! ), DCs of Stargate size are probably best suited to cold countries or areas with extremely cheap domestic energy supply, and perhaps one day space.
What the UK must do is be the best place for companies in areas of AI where we have abundant strengths to start and scale - novel chips, heterogenous compute systems, edge inference, photonics, new model architectures, frontier models in biology, chemistry, physical sciences, voice, embodied AI, advanced engineering in robotics, agent security. The list goes on.
I hope the companies building in those sectors get the same press coverage for each of their technical breakthroughs & commercial milestones as this OpenAI story has got!