US chipmaker Nvidia, valued at $5.5tn, is donating $250m (£4.1tn) worth of computing power to the UK. This five-year commitment is intended to support AI safety research across the country.
The announcement coincides with the UK government's confirmation that its AI Security Institute, which tests advanced AI models, will be able to examine new technology from companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google prior to its release.
Nvidia stated that the donation would "support agentic safety and security research across the UK." Agentic AI refers to highly capable computer programs that can autonomously design and perform sequences of tasks. Concerns about these AI agents have increased since OpenAI confirmed a "swarm" of agents attacked tech startup Hugging Face earlier this year.
While Nvidia did not specifically mention the AI Security Institute, it indicated that most of the funds would "support the wider UK AI safety and security research community." A portion of the funding will go to the British Open-Ended Learning and Discovery Lab, the Science of Fundamental AI Research Lab – run by Edinburgh, Cambridge, Oxford, and University College London universities – and Imperial College London.
Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, commented that the UK brings "world-class scientific rigour to this essential engineering challenge." Kanishka Narayan, the UK’s AI minister, described the announcement as a "vote of confidence in our world-leading strength and expertise in AI research."