The UK announced a £1.1 billion plan to boost the country’s AI technology with a new AI Hardware Plan.

The plan sets out how the government will back UK companies developing the chips and semiconductor technologies behind AI, while also investing in the scientits, engineers, and technicians required by these AI ambitions.

“AI is the defining currency of economic and hard power in today’s world and the countries that control the hardware behind it will hold the keys to the future,” technology secretary Liz Kendall said.

“The UK is already a global leader in chip design, and I believe this is a race Britain can win. To do that, we must back more British AI – and that means investing in the chips, computing power and skilled people behind it.

“That is exactly what this plan does, backing the British firms developing the next generation of AI hardware, so we get more jobs, more growth, and more control over the technologies our future depends on. We are backing Britain because we believe in Britain.”

The AI Hardware Plan includes several main points:

•  £750 million for a national AI supercomputer, which aims to be deployed by 2030.
• £400 milion wil go towards next-generation chips for the supercomputer. £150m of this will be used to buy next-generation inference chips, while a further £250m will go towards more specialised chips
• £120m will fund  new AI Hardware Innovation Programme, giving British companies the funding to design, develop, and test new chips.
• At least £20m will go towards expanding the Scaling Inference Lab, delivered by ARIA and CommonAI, to help companies improve their tech. Oriole Networks, working AMD and the Lab, will deploy a large-scale AI ystem that uses light rather than electrical signals.
• £45m will go towards new support for skills training, from engineers and chip designers to doctoral trining and undergraduate bursaries

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Further, a new fund led by Silicon Valley investors Playground Global – whose partners include Pat Gelsinger, former CEO of Intel – and backed by up to £150m from the British Business Bank, will invest in UK-based AI hardware companies. This mars the single largest investment the British Business Bank has ever made.