The UK government has recruited tech leaders from VC firm Balderton, Google DeepMind and Monzo to help steer the country’s AI strategy, as part of a package of measures announced on Friday.
James Wise, partner at London-based Balderton Capital, has been named chair of the UK government’s sovereign AI unit. The initiative, tasked with helping build and scale AI capabilities in the UK, has been backed by nearly £500m in investment.
Meanwhile, Monzo cofounder Tom Blomfield, VP of research at DeepMind Raia Hadsell and Nobel Prize-winning economist Simon Johnson have been appointed “AI ambassadors” to oversee talent, commercialisation and adoption, respectively.
Announced earlier this year as part of the AI Opportunities Action Plan, authored by Entrepreneurs First’s Matt Clifford, the UK’s sovereign AI unit has already established partnerships with international AI giants like Anthropic, Nvidia, Cohere and OpenAI to enable the UK to build sovereign AI capabilities.
The unit also collaborates with the UK’s biggest backer of VC funds, the British Business Bank, to deliver investment into UK AI startups and regional AI growth zones. As part of the package announced Friday, the UK designated a new AI growth zone in south Wales, between Newport and Bridgend, promising £10bn of investment to build data centres in the area.
The government also confirmed SoftBank and Graphcore would launch a new development lab in Bristol, American AI company Groq would open a data centre in London, while San Francisco-based Perplexity will invest £80m into expanding its offices in the country.
It also committed to act as a "first-customer" for UK compute startups, which is backed by £100m in investment. Dave Grimm, partner at AlbionVC who advised the government on this, tells Sifted this is a game-changer for the UK's promising crop of hardware startups who currently struggle getting first customers and a subsequent proof point. The cash the government is committing is "dwarfed by the impact that actually being able to deploy and have a first customer will have for these startups," he adds.
Wise, in a LinkedIn post announcing his new position, says the sovereignty unit’s £500m fund aims to be “the first choice of partner for founders building essential parts of the UK’s AI infrastructure.”
“I look forward to working with the team to build and launch this initiative in the coming months to make this critical technology work for all of us in Britain,” he added.
Wise, who has been at Balderton for 13 years and sits on the boards of companies such as GoCardless and Tibber Energy, also holds a seat on the UK government’s Industrial Development Advisory Board.
