By Rachel Reeves,Simon Hunt
Copyright cityam
Google has pledged to invest £5bn into the British economy as it opens its first owned and operated data centre in the UK.
The tech giant said the investment, which comprises capital spending and research and development over the next two years, will bolster its AI-powered projects in science and healthcare, creating more than 8,000 jobs.
The move, which is set to be the first of a number of US tech investments unveiled this week amid the state visit of Donald Trump, has been described as a “vote of confidence in the UK” by Rachel Reeves, providing a much-needed boost to the chancellor after healthcare giant Merck last week walked away from a planned £1bn research centre in London.
“The UK has a rich history of being at the forefront of technology – from Lovelace to Babbage to Turing – so it’s fitting that we’re continuing that legacy by investing in the next wave of innovation and scientific discovery in the UK,” said Demis Hassabis, Co-Founder and CEO of London-based Google DeepMind.
As part of the president’s state visit on Thursday, Trump’s team including treasury secretary Scott Bessent, vice-president JD Vance and commerce secretary Howard Lutnick are expected to be joined by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, as well as the financiers Larry Fink and Stephen Schwarzman, in a visit to the Prime Minister’s estate at Chequers.
Surge in data centre investment
The new data centre in Waltham Cross, just north of London, was first announced by Google in January last year with the project set to cost nearly £800m.
A planning application to turn the 33-acre field into a data centre was first submitted to the Borough of Broxbourne in 2018 by a now-defunct company called STX-10. A Google subsidiary later acquired the land in 2020 for £55m and progressed with the development.
Google has been battling to gain a foothold in the UK’s cloud market, and has so far lagged behind the likes of Microsoft and Amazon, which are each thought to control as much as a 40 per cent market share, according to a study by the UK’s competition regulator.
Blackrock this week also announced a major investment into UK data centres, with the New York asset manager pledging to spend £500m.
There were more than three dozen planning applications for data centres in the UK in 2024, a 40 per cent jump on the previous year according to an analysis by UKTN, as tech firms raced to build enough compute to power the growing demands of AI.
