UK Focuses on AI With £31B in Big Tech Deals While Keeping Crypto at Arm’s Length

Group 1: Investment Announcements - American Big Tech firms announced a total of £31 billion ($42.3 billion) in planned investments in the U.K. as part of a "Tech Prosperity Deal" [2][8] - Microsoft committed to spending $30 billion over the next four years, marking its largest investment in the U.K. [2][3] - Google pledged £5 billion over two years for AI research and cloud infrastructure development [9] Group 2: AI Infrastructure Development - Half of Microsoft's investment will be allocated to expanding its data center footprint, including a new supercomputer with 23,000 Nvidia GPUs [3] - Nvidia plans to ship 120,000 Blackwell processors to the U.K., representing the largest AI infrastructure rollout in the country's history [4] - Stargate UK aims to deploy 8,000 GPUs in the first quarter of 2026, with potential scalability to 31,000 processors [6] Group 3: Partnerships and Acquisitions - Nvidia announced a £500 million stake acquisition in British AI infrastructure startup NScale, which is involved in Microsoft's supercomputer project [5] - A £500 million investment from BlackRock, in partnership with Digital Gravity Partners, will upgrade existing data centers with new Nvidia technology [4] Group 4: Crypto Policy - Despite the focus on AI, cooperation on crypto policy is not a top priority in the U.K.-U.S. partnership [8][10]