AI minister Kanishka Narayan has called for greater investment in British technology in a speech to the AI community
AI minister Kanishka Narayan(Image: John Myers)
A UK chip start-up is planning to invest £100m in its operations including expanding its Bristol and London sites, it has announced. Newbury-headquartered Fractile will create a new UK industrial hardware engineering facility in the West Country and grow its British team to develop next-generation systems, it said.
Engineers at the new Bristol facility will build Fractile’s chips into systems that will make new kinds of AI tasks possible. It will also host a lab where experts can test new software designed for future compute technology — capable of running the most powerful AI models much faster than today’s hardware.
The announcement comes as the AI minister urged more UK tech entrepreneurs to “take bold risks” and vowed to “back the builders and the innovators”.
Kanishka Narayan said greater British technology ownership was needed for the UK to “command deeper influence shaping a positive future for breakthrough tech like AI”.
“I am setting Britain’s AI leaders a challenge – bang the drum for start-ups, spread the opportunities to every corner of our country, and embrace risk,” he said. “This is how we leverage AI to serve hard-working people, our economy, and British values.
“By investing in British tech innovation, just as Fractile is doing today, we can reinforce our leadership in AI and boost our influence on the global stage.”
Fractile’s announcement comes less than a year after US tech giant Nvidia pledged to invest in its own AI lab at the University of Bristol, which is home to Isambard-AI – the UK’s most powerful supercomputer. The California-headquartered company is injecting up to £11bn into Britain’s AI ecosystem in a development that will establish the UK as home to Europe’s most substantial graphics processing unit (GPU) cluster.
The West of England also struck a landmark technology deal with the US last year, aimed at driving growth and investment in quantum businesses across the region.
The Government has pledged £1bn to increase Britain’s computer capacity 20-fold by 2030, including through the creation of a series of AI “growth zones” designed to hasten planning approvals for new data centres.
