Who needs government when you’ve got Nvidia?

Welcome to AI Collision 💥,

In today’s collision between AI and our world:

• Prime Minister and Huang, or Prime Minster Huang?
• Nebius and Nscale pump the Blackwells
• Alphawave’s buyout

If that’s enough to get Nvidia’s coup rolling, read on…

AI Collision 💥

It’s London Tech Week 2025, and the UK just made its strongest bid yet to rejoin the frontlines of the global AI race.

At centre stage, Prime Minister Starmer, flanked by none other than Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. Clearly Starmer pulled a couple strings to get the King of AI over the Atlantic. Because when the man behind the world’s most valuable chipmaker flies in to talk up your AI scene, it’s not out of courtesy, it’s out of strategy.

And Huang made that strategy very clear,

“The UK has the third-largest AI venture capital investment in the world. The two largest are the US and China, which is fairly obvious,”

“The UK has one of the richest AI communities anywhere on the planet—the deepest thinkers, and the best universities… and you’re rich with great computer scientists. It’s a fantastic place for venture capital to invest.”

He’s not wrong. Britain’s AI brainpower is immense. But for years, it’s lacked the support, the capital, and the political willpower to convert that intelligence into industrial power. That may finally be changing.

But I don’t necessarily think it’s the government that makes it happen, I think it’s more likely that Nvidia pushes this forward, and the government just kind of goes with the flow.

Enter Nebius AI (NASDAQ: NBIS). This week, the Dutch company announced it will establish a new sovereign-grade AI compute cluster in the UK laden with Nvidia’s Blackwell Ultra GPUS. It’s a serious infrastructure commitment from one of the world’s fastest-growing AI platforms (backed by Nvidia).

They say this cluster,

“Supports UK AI development strategy and creates new opportunities for British businesses, researchers and public sector.”

Then another huge announcement came from Nscale, a UK-based cloud and compute player that most people haven’t heard of—yet. Backed by Nvidia, Nscale revealed plans to deploy 10,000 Blackwell GPUs by 2026, building out a domestic AI compute backbone capable of hosting next-gen foundation models, national R&D efforts, and scalable enterprise workloads.

Blackwells are Nvidia’s most advanced AI chips, designed for massive throughput and model complexity. And they’re coming to the UK in bulk.

On top of these Nvidia backed AI cluster infrastructure developers, Nvidia is also helping to found the UK Sovereign AI Industry Forum, a public-private coalition aimed at supporting homegrown AI innovation while reducing reliance on overseas infrastructure. Members include BT, National Grid, BAE Systems, and Nscale—linking up telecoms, energy, defence, and compute in one industrial push.

For a country that’s spent the last decade exporting its best ideas and watching others scale them, this is a rare moment of alignment. British universities birthed DeepMind. British engineers built Arm. And now, with some of the most capable infrastructure in Europe on the way, British companies may finally have the tools to build and keep the next generation of AI giants.

Of course, for every bold infrastructure play, there’s a reminder of what’s often gone wrong.

This week, Qualcomm confirmed a $2.4 billion takeover of Alphawave (LSE:AWE), the London-listed connectivity chipmaker whose tech is world-class—but whose stock price never told that story. The market may have overlooked it, but Qualcomm didn’t. It saw essential high-speed interconnect IP, exactly the kind of tech needed to keep AI data centres running at full tilt.

Alphawave is a metaphor for the broader UK AI story, genius-level engineering, built in Britain, but sold off before scale. Nvidia and Qualcomm aren’t just investing in the UK, they’re capitalising on a market that’s failed to value its own technical brilliance.

And therein lies the opportunity.

If the UK is finally building sovereign compute infrastructure, establishing public-private AI coalitions, and attracting the right kind of foreign capital, then maybe, just maybe, it can stop exporting value and start maximising it domestically.

Make no mistake, Nvidia’s presence in the UK isn’t some altruistic gesture. It’s a statement that with China all but out of bounds due to export controls, Britain just became one of the most geopolitically aligned, talent-rich, and strategically stable landing zones for the next wave of AI expansion.

Nvidia is building more than chips. It’s building an empire.

And like any empire worth its salt, it needs reliable territory. Britain, with its compute-ready partners, world-leading institutions, and massive reservoir of scientific talent, fits the brief perfectly.

I’m not saying the UK is about to dethrone the US or China. But I am saying maybe there’s a great deal of cause for a little more optimism about the UK’s AI future than perhaps there was even just a few weeks ago.

#AD

June 25th: “Trump’s AI Wealth Day”

Mark your calendar for 25.06.2025. 

Because on that day, Executive Order 14179 could ignite Phase 2 of the AI boom.

And early investors could be in line for massive gains.

Capital at risk

Boomers & Busters 💰

AI and AI-related stocks moving and shaking up the markets this week. (All performance data below over the rolling week).

Boom 📈

• Micron (NASDAQ:MU) up 11%
• SK Hynix (KOR:A000660) up 11%
• Arm (NASDAQ:ARM) up 9%

Bust 📉

• Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) down 5%
• Vertiv (NYSE:VRT) down 3%
• Broadcom (NASDAQ:AVGO) down 4%

From the hive mind 🧠

• At first, I wasn’t sure if this was a trailer for a new horror movie or not. I don’t think it is. But it could be. Nonetheless, it makes sense to train a robot, why not just throw it into the arena and see what it can do.
• I saw a post earlier today that said the seed investors in Scale AI are set to make around 500-times-plus their investment capital. Not a bad rate of return in around nine years. And here’s why they’re set to cash in.
• Looks like Tesla is a lot closer to a real-world rollout of full self-driving (driverless) cars than people realise. How would you feel if in traffic a Tesla pulled up next to you with no one in the front, just passengers in the back?

Artificial Polltelligence 🗳️

Weirdest AI image of the day

Was this a Scholastic Book Fair Exclusive?

ChatGPT’s random quote of the day

Thanks for reading, and don’t forget to leave comments and questions below,

Sam Volkering

Editor-in-Chief

AI Collision