Power up, crack down

Good morning and welcome back to your morning hit of AI news. Today's edition smells good ☕.

Happening Today 🗓️

You've got mail: Ofcom and the Information Commissioner's Office published a letter to tech companies this morning telling them to enforce minimum age restrictions, tackle grooming and make feeds safer. The timing is interesting — we're in the middle of a consultation on this — but Ofcom is under pressure from tech secretary Liz Kendall to go faster. They've singled out Facebook, Instagram, Roblox, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube to show action by the end of April.

Working on it: Kendall also announced a package of reforms this morning to get more women working in tech. It includes 300 paid tech placements, support for those returning after career breaks and a national schools competition. The Women in Tech Taskforce has also opened a Call for Evidence.

Ethics minefield: Business in the Community is launching a Responsible AI Framework this afternoon at Verizon's London offices to help organisations navigate the ethical complexities of AI.

In Parliament: Support for entrepreneurs is among the questions MPs will ask the business and trade secretary this morning.

News In Brief 🩳

Nothing to see here: Takeovers of UK AI firms by foreign companies will no longer be automatically screened for national security concerns in a bid to speed up investment, the FT reports.

Getting the money: The British Business Bank has invested £2m in AI defence startup Hadean, Entrepreneurs First has raised $200m to back the next generation of founders, Dutch cloud company Nebius, which opened its first UK data centre last year, is getting a $2 billion investment from Nvidia.

Incoming: Tech companies would be criminally liable for harm caused by AI chatbots under an amendment laid by Beeban Kidron to the Crime and Policing Bill. The move has cross-party support and will be debated by the Lords on March 18. Kidron has a long history of forcing legislative changes on online safety and is meeting with officials this week about it. Campaign groups said it would "set a new global standard for holding tech companies accountable".

Plug in, crack down

The government has published details of how it will get its AI Growth Zones and massive new data centres connected to the grid faster, while a competition decision is also looming on whether to take action against some US hyperscalers. Both policies can support UK tech firms.

Consulting now: The grid proposals will cut the wait for connections by ditching data centres which aren't viable, reserving capacity for projects the government believes are the most strategic and aligning data centre connections to regional infrastructure. The consultation closes on April 15.

Time wasters: The reforms aim to tackle speculative data centre applications clogging up the queue. The energy systems operator, NESO, reckons there are around 140 data centres waiting for a connection, representing around 50GW of capacity — that's more than the country's peak energy use.

See you in 2041: The government was already reforming the grid connection process, but that had little impact on demand for connections, which grew by 460% in the first six months of last year, or on connection waits which are 15 years.

Serious players only: Ben Richardson, VP of Strategy at CoreWeave, said the reforms were a "really important step". Gary Wojtaszek, executive chairman of data centre developer Pure DC, said: "This is exactly what we’ve been requesting. This is great news for all serious DC developers."

A different growth lever

Hyperscalers like Microsoft, Amazon and Google are investing billions in UK data centres — but they're also at the centre of a competition battle MPs debated yesterday. MPs accused the CMA of being too slow to use its new digital markets powers, especially against Google and Apple's mobile dominance, while a decision on its long-delayed cloud investigation into Microsoft and Amazon is now expected at the end of this month.

A trip down Memory Lane: I covered these new powers, given to the Competition Markets Authority (CMA), as they went through Parliament in 2023. They were almost killed off several times through fierce lobbying by Big Tech companies, but when they survived there was great hope they'd lead to swift action. An under-pressure CMA, however, hasn't been able to deliver at the speed hoped for.

We've got the law: Opening a debate in Westminster Hall, Conservative MP Peter Fortune said: "We have already legislated for stronger digital competition, but slow implementation and weak early enforcement risk squandering a rare pro-growth and pro-SME opportunity."

Growth = ? The CMA has been given a mandate by the government to create "economic growth", but shadow tech secretary Julia Lopez said: "If growth is defined as just bringing in big tech, it is predictable how the regulator will act."

Responding for the government: AI minister Kanishka Narayan said: "We are taking a whole-of-government approach to ensure that the right conditions are in place for businesses to reach their full potential."

Spotted Elsewhere 👀

A weekly round-up of interesting stuff I've read.

Who are you? It's been a big week for Nscale and the NYT has a profile of the former coal miner behind the company which a large chunk of Britain's AI ambitions now rest on.

Life after Davos: The Startup Coalition's Martha Dacombe has a great framing for the post-Davos order and what that means for domestic politics and the economy.

Sticking with Substack: Max Bray has a lot of thoughts about how to build a "nation of entrepreneurs" and why that's so vital.

That's your lot, back tomorrow.

Tom