UK cloud firm plans 40 data centres
An alternative to AI Growth Zones.
Good morning, I've spent so long sorting out my wife's Vinted parcels that I'm writing this way too late, but I promise you it's a good one.
What do you get when British innovation meets Nvidia’s top open source models? Meet Jupiter — a UK LLM, developed by London startup Locai Labs. It's built by post-training on Nvidia’s Nemotron 3 models to give it British language, knowledge and humour. There is even a Welsh version. All its training data is public and there is no Chinese open source in sight. Jupiter gives UK organisations a new sovereign reasoning model with frontier performance that can be deployed on-premises or on the cloud — and it’s trained for maximum performance on agentic tasks.
Happening Today 📆
AI shield: The CyberUK conference concludes in Glasgow with speakers including Ofcom's Natalie Black and DSIT's Rod Latham. The event has produced plenty of headlines so far coming two weeks after the limited release of Claude Mythos. Security Minister Dan Jarvis said yesterday the UK needed to work with AI companies to build a "national cyber shield". The Telegraph, meanwhile, has a profile of No.10 AI adviser Jade Leung, focusing on her security work.
Topic du jour: The first 'Londonmaxxing' meet-up is happening at Ramen Space in Dalston from 6pm. You can get yourself in the mood by listening to this podcast with Matt Clifford and Ian Hogarth about how the UK can "win" at AI over the next 25 years.
Stargate 2.0: OpenAI may have cancelled the "Stargate UK" project before it had barely begun, but the AI Growth Zone at Cobalt Park, near Newcastle, where part of Stargate was meant to be based, is in touch with "alternative customers", AI minister Kanishka Narayan has said. "The AI Growth Zones programme is not contingent on any single investor," he wrote to regular pen pal Chi Onwurah.
In today's edition for paid subscribers:
🏗️ A UK cloud firm bets on an alternative approach to hyperscale data centres.
🟨 The Lib Dems' AI manifesto — it is actually quite radical.
😞 Skills England defends funding AI courses for £25 an hour.