CoreWeave executive Ben Richardson speaks to Tech.eu about the company's UK and European plans.
An executive who runs the international business of a US cloud company central to the UK’s AI plans says it’s leasing data centre space in the UK rather than building data centres so as to bring compute to the market as quickly as possible, amid soaring demand.
Backed by Nvidia, CoreWeave, along with Nscale, is key to the UK government’s AI plans, pledging billions of pounds of investment in AI data centre capacity into the UK.
CoreWeave currently operates two data centres in England: one in London Docklands with partner Digital Switch, and one in Crawley with partner Digital Realty.
It is also partnering on a data centre in Lanarkshire, Scotland, with partner DataVita.
Ben Richardson, VP strategy, who heads up its international strategy, said: “The main reason that we took the approach we took in the UK is speed. When you look at the AI market, speed is one of the greatest currencies, if not the greatest currency. We needed to bring compute to satisfy the demand to our customers. And when you are trying to do that, you need to do that at the fastest velocity you can. And the fastest way to do that on analysing the market in the UK is to sub-lease space inside of an existing facility. Otherwise, generally speaking, it might take you two to two and a half, three years.”
Speaking on the Tech.eu podcast, Richardson also spoke about CoreWeave’s strategy in the UK and Europe, its relationship with the UK government, the challenge of onboarding new chips, and CoreWeave’s business model.
CoreWeave, commonly known as a neocloud, has inked in multi-billion-dollar AI infrastructure deals with Meta and Microsoft.