The Chancellor has welcomed the “safe bet” world leading tech and AI companies are making in Britain, as over £2 billion of investment in the UK has been secured in a single week.
Supporting more than 1,300 skilled jobs, Siemens Healthineers have today announced that they are investing £250 million to design and manufacture superconducting magnets for MRI scanners at a new Siemens Healthineers facility in North Oxfordshire.
This comes as world leading AI firm CoreWeave are also investing £1 billion in the UK, as well as confirming their new European Headquarters will be based in the capital.
These two UK data centres will be opened in 2024, with a further expansion planned in 2025, helping secure the necessary processing power for machine learning and AI, graphics and rendering, life sciences and real-time streaming.
This £2 billion investment also follows Scale AI, the data infrastructure company for AI, selecting London as the location for its first European headquarters.
Earlier this week, Wayve announced they had secured over $1.05 billion to develop the next generation of AI-powered self-driving vehicles in the UK. Founded in the UK in 2017, Wayve is a home-grown British success story and a testament to the UK’s global leadership in creating the economic and regulatory conditions for start-ups in the AI and self-driving vehicle industries to grow and thrive.
Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt said:
Businesses are making a safe bet in Britain. We have attracted the third highest amount of greenfield foreign direct investment since 2010 and the UK accounts for around half of all AI private capital investment in Europe. We really are turning a corner, and the businesses of the future agree.
The UK accounts for around half of all AI private capital investment in Europe and hundreds more AI companies are starting up in the UK every year, growing our economy and creating highly-skilled, well-paid jobs. The AI sector employs more than 50,000 people in the UK and contributes more than £3.7 billion to our economy every year. By 2035, our AI market is forecast to grow to over $1 trillion.
Taken together, these investments cement the UK’s position as a world leader in the AI and tech industry and builds on our strong record of attracting the best and biggest investments from world leading AI companies.
Bernd Montag, Chief Executive of Siemens Healthineers said:
MRI technology plays a vital role in diagnosing disease, helping patients to get healthy and stay healthy. As a world leader in medical imaging, we are very proud to open the next chapter of our history here in Oxford.
This factory will be the global centre for our innovative low-helium magnet technology, meaning we consume far less of a scarce natural resource and enable access to MRIs for many more patients.
Mike Intrator, Cofounder and Chief Executive Officer, CoreWeave said:
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 localized high-performance compute solutions that will help build and deploy the next generation of AI applications.
Secretary of State for Science, Innovation, and Technology Michelle Donelan said:
I have always said that the proof will be in the pudding when it comes to cementing the UK’s place as a technology superpower – and there is no better proof than the fact that our tech sector has received £2billion of private investment in a single week! Time and again, world leading tech companies are choosing the UK to invest in – bringing new jobs and opportunities for people to gain valuable skills.
Siemens, Wayve, CoreWeave, ScaleAI – these are major players that countries all across Europe and the world are keen to attract. Yet it is our unique, agile and highly-ambitious tech ecosystem that I have proudly helped to build that is winning the race for the UK.
Some of the world’s biggest AI companies including Open AI and Anthropic have also chosen London as the base for their first international offices in a huge vote of confidence in our approach to AI. Microsoft recently announced a new AI hub in London, and one of the leaders in the field, Google DeepMind was also founded here over a decade ago and remains in the UK to this day.
We also have a world-leading AI and tech industry in the UK which is continuing to grow. The UK is only the 3rd country (behind the US and China) in the world to have a tech sector valued at over $1 trillion in total. The UK is also home to 3rd highest number of AI companies and private capital investment in AI in the world.
The single biggest way we’re backing businesses is by creating the economic conditions for them to thrive, which is why we have worked with the Bank of England to reduce inflation from over 11.5 to 3.2%, this means that wages have been rising faster than inflation for nine months in a row.
Because the economy has turned a corner we can cuts taxes, including our cuts to National Insurance worth £900 for the average worker, and full expensing which effectively cuts corporation tax by more than £50 billion to help firms invest for less – the biggest business tax cut in modern British history.
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