Last week, I had the pleasure of joining a panel of industry experts at the techUK Innovation Summit to explore a big question: Can the UK build its first trillion-dollar tech company? Here are my five key takeaways from that discussion:
1. The UK Has the Talent
Let’s start with the positive. The panel unanimously agreed that the UK has the intellectual firepower, capital, and talent to build a trillion-dollar (why dollar by the way!?!?) tech giant. As Jensen Huang said in his recent conversation with Zoe Kleinman “the UK has all the ingredients necessary to lead artificial intelligence.” We have the researchers, the innovators, the universities, and world-class companies like Arm leading the way. What we don’t yet have is abundant access to the tools (GPUs) or a strong track record of commercialising our breakthroughs. We’re still too often a nation of “potting-shed inventors” in a world where speed, scale and infrastructure win.
2. Infrastructure Will Define Our Tech Future
The elephant in the room was simple: power. Interestingly, concerns on this were from both ends of the digital lifecycle - data centres right up to semiconductor manufacture. Why? Well, the UK has some of the highest electricity costs in Europe, a grid struggling to modernise and circulate readily available green electrons, and slow approvals for new capacity. This is already pushing compute-intensive investment away. We hear it directly from customers: those headline “big AI investment announcements” made during Donald and Jensen’s visit to the UK, will not happen without major movement on energy pricing.
A stark example: Nscale — a brilliant UK-founded, UK-headquartered company—is deploying £230M of data centre infrastructure in Norway, not Britain. This investment could have underpinned one of our new AI Growth Zones, driving UK jobs and innovation. Instead, it will fuel Norway’s economy. Change on UK power pricing is needed now.
3. A Risk-Averse Investment Culture Is Holding Us Back
The panel also highlighted a cultural difference in how the UK finances large-scale technology projects. The US, China, Japan and many European nations operate on a “build it and they will come” philosophy. The UK, by contrast, leans backwards toward tentativeness and risk aversion. In an AI race moving at unprecedented speed—while other countries have already committed to thousands of GPUs—caution is its own form of failure. The panel’s message was clear: the greatest risk is inaction, and frontier AI isn’t waiting for government processes and investment in infrastructure to catch up.
4. The UK Faces a Critical Skills Crunch
To meet projected data-centre demand by 2030, the UK will need an additional 125,000 electricians. That number is both sobering and revealing: AI isn’t just creating jobs in coding or machine learning—it’s generating huge demand in the skilled trades that physically power the digital revolution.
However, at the same time, we need to add to this the demographic reality: the average age of workers in the sector is in the 50s and 60s. We’re approaching a workforce cliff just as demand reaches historic highs.
5. Outdated AI Copyright Law Is Stifling Innovation
Generative AI now dominates global compute demand. But, it relies on access to vast quantities of text and data to train LLMs. The UK’s stricter AI copyright rules—tougher than both the US and EU—are pushing investment away. Industrial-scale operators are choosing to build elsewhere, taking jobs, revenue, and innovation with them.
Entrepreneurs like Jennifer Chinenye Umoke from Brilliant AI face a stark reality: she cannot legally carry out text and data mining for her LLMs in the UK due to restrictive regulation. Instead, she must pay to use cloud infrastructure in France and bring the outputs back home. Matt Clifford said the UK should be an “AI maker, not taker.” Today, we’re moving in the opposite direction. You can read more about this in our 'AI maker, not taker' whitepaper here: https://kaodata.com/taker-not-maker
The Bottom Line
The summit highlighted both extraordinary promise and urgent challenges. The UK has world-class science, exceptional founders, and thriving innovation clusters. But unless we modernise our power infrastructure, speed up decision-making, address skills shortages, update regulation, and adopt a bolder attitude to risk, the dream of creating a trillion-dollar tech company will remain just that—a dream.
Despite techUK’s strong efforts, this government (and its predecessors) remain high on ambition but frustratingly slow and light on delivery.
Adam Nethersole
Adam Nethersole is VP of Marketing at Kao Data and his experience covers a decade of working within data centres and digital infrastructure. Interested in green tech and sustainable computing.