CoreWeave Adds to UK's AI Ecosphere with £1bn Investment
The new UK expansion represents a broader expansion into the continent, and will include a £1 billion (US$1.25 billion) investment across its engineering, operations, finance and go-to-market.
Speaking on the announcement, CEO Mike Intrator hailed London as an AI Hub. "We are seeing unprecedented demand for AI infrastructure and London is an important AI hub that we are investing in. Expanding our physical footprint in the UK is an important milestone in the next phase of CoreWeave's growth.
"CoreWeave's infrastructure will fill a void in the cloud market by providing AI enterprises with localised high-performance compute solutions that will help build and deploy the next generation of AI applications,”
This announcement comes days after the company secured $1.1 billion in new funding to support the growth across the business and expansion into new geographic regions to meet the demand for GPU accelerated cloud infrastructure worldwide.
AI’s cloud computing need
As the AI boom keeps accelerating, the number of companies that need more powerful computers to design and run their AI programs does too.
Regular cloud providers aren’t optimised for these demanding tasks, but CoreWeave building of a cloud infrastructure specifically designed for AI businesses will allow it.
This can give AI enterprises the muscle to develop and deploy the next generation of AI applications. CoreWeave's presence in the region will support the expansion of AI labs and its enterprise customers across the UK.
CoreWeave mentioned they planned to open two UK data centres in 2024 with further expansion planned in 2025, alongside its announcement.
Its existing data centres manage complexity through automation to deliver cloud infrastructure for AI workloads and support some of the largest deployments of high-performance GPU clusters in the world.
Although the computational power provided by the cloud is accessible across the globe, the fact that the UK was selected underscores its position as an attractive location for AI companies and cloud providers.
UK’s position in AI and cloud computing
Regulation surrounding data centres in the large European, EU countries is heavily regulated. The EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres was developed as early as 2008.
The UK in comparison has relatively few laws, with the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology only launching a consultation on the regulation of data centres in 2023.
Equally, the UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who was in power when the first GenAI craze of ChatGPT swept much of the world last year, has been repeatedly posturing for the UK to become an AI superpower.
Alongside creating the AI Safety Summit in 2023, the first global summit on AI, he incorporated the Office for Artificial Intelligence into the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology in February 2024, and earlier this week he hailed news of a UK startup that secured Europe’s biggest-ever AI investment.
The UK is the third largest AI market in the world after the US and China.
A 2023 City of London report showed the UK is leading AI investment in Europe, with UK AI scale-ups securing nearly double the funding compared to France, Germany, and the rest of Europe combined.
******
Make sure you check out the latest edition of AI Magazine and also sign up to our global conference series - Tech & AI LIVE 2024
******
AI Magazine is a BizClik brand
