UK Gov launches ambitious plan to make UK 'irresistible' to AI firms

The Labour government’s 32-page AI Opportunities Action Plan outlines 50 recommendations for making AI the centre of the country’s growth push.

The government's recommendations, which it claims will make the UK “irresistible to AI firms,” include creating a dedicated National Data Library that would provide developers access to training data, launching dedicated ‘AI Growth Zones’ to speed up planning proposals for data centres, and reforming the country’s copyright rules to introduce text and data mining regimes to balance innovation and intellectual property rights.

The Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer said: “AI will drive incredible change in our country. From teachers personalising lessons to supporting small businesses with their record-keeping to speeding up planning applications, it has the potential to transform the lives of working people.

“But the AI industry needs a government that is on their side, one that won’t sit back and let opportunities slip through its fingers. And in a world of fierce competition, we cannot stand by. We must move fast and take action to win the global race.”

The Labour government has sought to continue the efforts of the previous Conservative government under Rishi Sunak to try to position the country as a leading player in AI.

The Starmer administration said if fully realised, AI could boost productivity by 1.5 percentage points a year, equating to an average of £47 billion to the UK each year over a decade.

The extensive plan revolves around three key pillars:

• ‘Laying the foundations for AI to flourish in the UK’ - includes building new AI supercomputers and massively speeding up planning approvals for data centres.

• ‘Boosting adoption across public and private sectors’ - includes setting up a new digital centre of government that would focus on embedded AI into public sector settings, like the National Health Service (NHS).

• ‘Keeping us ahead of the pack’ - includes creating a new unit dedicated to wooing AI firms to set up and scale in Britain, including guaranteeing companies access to data and energy.

Matt Clifford CBE, founder of the startup accelerator Entrepreneur First, was appointed by the government to lead the Action Plan project.

“This is a plan which puts us all-in - backing the potential of AI to grow our economy, improve lives for citizens, and make us a global hub for AI investment and innovation,” Clifford said. “AI offers opportunities we can’t let slip through our fingers, and these steps put us on the strongest possible footing to ensure AI delivers in all corners of the country, from building skills and talent to revolutionising our infrastructure and compute power.”

Top of the line for the Action Plan is expanding the country’s data centre arsenal.

Some £25 billion (US$30 billion) of new investment in data centres have been announced since Labour took office last July.

The government wants more, however, to support AI training and inference efforts.

The Action Plan includes recommendations to set up ‘AI Growth Zones’ (AIGZs), dedicated sites where prospective data centre operators could receive streamlined planning approvals and provisioning of power.

The Action Plan states that AIGZs could be used to “drive local rejuvenation” earmarking sites across the country including areas with existing energy capacity such as “post-industrial towns and coastal Scotland”.

The proposal would see existing government sites, such as Culham Science Centre in Culham, Oxfordshire as pilots for AIGZs.

Other data centre proposals could see the government create bespoke planning use classes, used to categorise types of property use, which would streamline the approval process for facilities.

The proposals add to news broken by Capacity last December of the government’s overhaul of planning rules that would allow new data centre proposals to apply for classification as “Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects” or (NSIPs) — meaning projects would receive a more centralised and expedited planning process overseen by the UK government.

The plan also suggests introducing a long-term plan for the country’s AI infrastructure to build “world-class AI compute” across a 10-year investment commitment.

The government aims to increase the capacity of the AI Research Resource (AIRR) by at least 20 times by 2030, with project expansion set to begin within six months.

The Action Plan suggests such an expansion would provide the AIRR with the required computing power needed to meet ever-expanding AI workloads. Such investments, however, would focus on smart procurement to “avoid vendor lock-in and ensure value for money”.

The latest proposals come as three major data centre firms, Vantage Data Centres, Nscale and Kyndryl, committed to a total of £14 billion investment to expand AI infrastructure the UK.

Vantage Data Centres is working to build one of Europe’s largest data centre campuses in Wales, Kyndryl plans to create up to 1,000 AI-related jobs in Liverpool over the next three years, and Nscale will invest $2.5 billion investment to support the UK’s data centre infrastructure over the next three years.

Nscale has also signed up to build the largest UK sovereign AI data centre in Loughton, Essex by 2026.

“Our investment in the UK marks a significant milestone in building next-generation AI infrastructure,” said Josh Payne, CEO of Nscale. “This expansion will help us meet the growing demand for generative AI by deploying advanced GPU clusters more efficiently.”

Part of the plan attempts to woo AI developers to Britain includes creating a “copyright-cleared British media asset training dataset”.

The corpus would be licensable at a global scale and would be able to be used to train next-generation AI models.

Works from bodies like the National Archives, Natural History Museum, British Library and the BBC could be used, providing a potentially lucrative use of historical texts at a time when developers are scrambling for access to training materials.

There’s also a proposal to overhaul the country’s copyright rules to make it easier for AI developers to use creatives' content unless the rightsholder has explicitly opted out of allowing that use.

A government consultation on such a proposal was opened last December to either create exceptions for AI model training that would allow protected materials to be used for training purposes, or a new mechanism for rightsholders that would force AI companies wanting to use their materials for AI training to obtain a licence.

John Buyers, global head of AI at the law firm Osborne Clarke questioned whether there would be any regulatory alignment between such a proposal and the forthcoming UK AI Safety Bill.

“The UK's current approach is defined by the Bletchley Declaration on Frontier AI and AI Governance White paper both of which were initiatives of the prior government, the latter as a sector regulator-based voluntary initiative,” Buyers told Capacity. “Unresolved questions on regulation create uncertainty which will heighten nervousness in UK plc as an ideal investment destination.”

The final recommendation in the AI Opportunities Action Plan is arguably its most ambitious — the creation of UK Sovereign AI, a government-backed research lab designed to partner with the private sector in developing next-generation AI capabilities.

The proposed unit would be tasked with supporting domestic startups and creating national AI champions. Its mandate would include fostering public-private collaborations, investing in promising startups, and incubating new ventures.

The proposed research lab would provide direct investment into AI companies, facilitating access to compute infrastructure, and package UK-owned datasets, like the proposed copyright-cleared British media corpus.

Beyond generative AI, UK Sovereign AI would also work across areas like robotics and embodied AI to aid the country’s existing research efforts.

UK Sovereign AI would also work on national projects to bring in overseas talent and headhunt promising founders or CEOs to convince them to set up shop in Britain, as well as collaborate with the national security community.

Commenting on the Action Plan’s proposals, Chintan Patel, chief technology officer of Cisco UK & Ireland said: “Having a clearly defined roadmap is critical for the UK to achieve its ambition to become an AI superpower and a leading destination for AI investment.

“We are at an inflection point with AI; what we do now will shape the next decade and beyond. Advances in AI are changing how we live, work and engage with public services, but there are foundational aspects that we must address now – from the infrastructure these models are built on, to the security that is core in ensuring models work as intended and data remains secure, and the skills required in the workforce to truly benefit from this technology.”

UK gov grants data centres national priority status to speed up planning permissions

AI copyright clash: UK considers legal reforms to balance innovation and rights

How can the UK help European telecoms business in 2025?