The UK government has created a Sovereign AI investment fund with up to £500 million (US$675 million) to spend on turning UK startups into national AI champions.
Its support could involve investments of up to £20 million per startup, or provision of up to 1 million GPU-hours of AI compute, and fast-tracking of visas to bring skilled workers to the UK.
The multi-million-pound budget sounds impressive, but it’s just 0.08% of OpenAI’s recent $852 billion valuation. That company just received fresh investment of $122 billion, dwarfing the UK’s sovereign fund.
Closer to home, that £500 million would buy about 5% of French AI startup Mistral, which has achieved its success by offering a European alternative for businesses that do not want to use American or Chinese AI providers.
The UK government does not have a great record when it comes to investing in national IT champions. In the 1960s and 1970s, the government ran the National Enterprise Board which provided funding to new technology companies, but even the biggest names helped in this way have slipped out of UK ownership: ICL, a mainframe challenger to IBM, eventually became part of Japan’s Fujitsu, while Inmos, an early innovator in parallel computing, is now part of Dutch chip giant STMicroelectronics.
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