AI minister Kanishka Narayan is calling on more UK tech startups to follow UK chip startup Fractile in investing in the UK.
UK tech startups are being urged to take bold risks, by the UK’s AI minister, saying the government will back them, as a UK chip startup pledges to invest £100m in its business.
The call comes as the UK government looks to make the UK an AI superpower, attracting investment from tech giants to build massive data centres and also be home to a flourishing domestic AI ecosystem.
However, questions persist as to whether the UK can meet its ambitious goals, and there are also concerns about the UK not building enough of its own AI tech, and being too reliant on US tech firms.
In a speech in London today, AI minister Kanishka Narayan calls on more UK tech startups to follow UK chip startup Fractile in committing fresh investment, saying the government will back them.
Narayan says: “I am setting Britain’s AI leaders a challenge – bang the drum for startups, spread the opportunities to every corner of our country, and embrace risk.
“This is how we leverage AI to serve hard-working people, our economy, and British values.”
The minister says greater British technology ownership is needed for the UK to command deeper influence.
He also says that future growth cannot be built for elites alone, and how, unlike previous waves of frontier technology, AI’s potential is broad, with an opportunity to spread the potential across regions and communities.
In his speech, Narayan will announce that Fractile, founded in 2022, which is developing next-generation chips looking to compete against chip heavyweight Nvidia, will be investing £100m in its UK HQ over the next three years.
Fractile, which is focused on LLM inference, the process where a pre-trained LLM generates text output, like answers to user prompts, intends to expand its London and Bristol sites and create a new UK industrial hardware engineering facility.
Fractile, which currently employs 80 people and is backed by the NATO Innovation Fund and Kindred Capital, also intends to grow its UK-based team to develop and optimise next-generation systems.