The Catch-22 holding back UK cloud
Public spend on US hyperscalers surges.
Good morning and Happy National Sandwich Day, or just every day.
So much for all the sovereignty talk, today we've got exclusive polling and research from FocalData and the Future of Technology Institute finding government cloud contracts with AWS and Microsoft surging.
But there are few UK alternatives and none at scale. British cloud firms struggle to win government contracts because they can't scale, and struggle to scale because government doesn’t buy from them. The research suggests some fixes and the Competition and Markets Authority has also been working on this.
AI is accelerating entrepreneurship
Technology is making it easier to start a business and reach customers around the world.
According to Shopify data, 78% of merchants globally built their own store and 43% more made their first sale within a day of signing up compared to 2022.
Once they are up and running, they also sell internationally. In the UK, export sales are up 136% since 2022.
For an economy looking to export more, The Entrepreneur Effect shows how technology is lowering the barriers to starting up and selling abroad.
Happening Today 📆
Science and the City: Science minister Chris McDonald gives the keynote this morning at techUK's Innovation Summit. There's a day of talks from startups, civil servants and policy folk. Orlando Crowcroft will be covering for us. Nearby, Bloomberg puts on its tech summit. Speakers include Kanishka Narayan, the Sovereign AI Fund's Suzanne Ashman, ElevenLabs co-founder Mati Staniszewski and Palantir's UK boss Louis Mosley.
Upping the threat: AI is helping to "industrialise" cyber threats, with an attack on the country's critical national infrastructure "highly likely" by 2028, Britain's cyber chief will warn today. Richard Horne, the chief executive of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), will say: “In the coming months, we face a real prospect of an unprecedented rise in the number of cyber incidents." At the same event, cyber minister Liz Lloyd will offer SMEs a discount on the government's "Cyber Essentials" scheme.
In Westminster: Ministers and civil servants give evidence to the Commons' Science and Technology Committee at 9:30am on the impact of tech on childhood. At 2pm, those who helped shape the Online Safety Act will be quizzed by the Lords' Communications and Digital Committee. Beeban Kidron, Jeremy Wright, Lorna Woods and Damian Collins will be asked if the Act is fulfilling its original aims.
In today's edition:
🇺🇸 Public spend on US cloud providers surges. Is there an alternative?
🌷 Social media and chatbot curbs for under-16s have been pushed to "late spring"
