Wales is in line for billions of pounds in investment and thousands of new jobs as the future home of “at least one” AI Growth Zone.
The UK Government said Wales had “a trove of potential sites” for the new initiative. It added that “several promising sites have already been identified”.
AI Growth Zones are a new concept first unveiled in January and are dedicated hotbeds for AI that speed up the rollout of infrastructure such as data centres.
The UK Government says their rollout will also mean permanent, high-skilled jobs and “a flurry of constructions roles”. It has set out a plan to increase the UK’s compute capacity 20-fold.
UK Secretary of State for Science, Innovation, and Technology, Peter Kyle said:
“From the coalmines of the Valleys to Swansea's mantra of ‘Copperopolis', Welsh trailblazers were the beating heart of the industrial revolution. AI is this generation’s next great industrial leap, so who better to help drive that change than a nation which has always been a by-word for innovation.
“While the Spending Review set out a £2 billion commitment which will cement our position as a global leader in AI for the long-term, these Growth Zones will revitalize communities in the here and now – unlocking fresh investment and new opportunities for those that have been left out in the cold for too long. That’s how we’re putting our Plan for Change into action.”
UK Secretary of State for Wales, Jo Stevens, said:
“Wales is already home to a thriving and growing tech industry and this investment in at least one AI Growth Zone for Wales is a vote of confidence in the Welsh economy and testament to the skills and potential of our workforce.
“This is another significant step forward in our central mission to kickstart economic growth, create well-paid jobs and unlock opportunity in the industries of the future.”
The UK Government expects AI Growth Zones to attract billions in private investment. The ideal ingredients for Growth Zones will be areas with large existing power connections, which will be powered by responsible and cutting-edge energy sources like small modular reactors (SMRs), it said. De-industrialised areas in particular already have the building blocks in place to meet these targets, with areas across Wales offering “a trove of potential sites”.
Wales has also set a target for 100% of its electricity needs to be met by renewable sources in the next decade, laying the foundations which could also be harnessed to drive AI growth across the country, the UK Government said.
Work is already underway to transform Wales into an AI powerhouse, with American company Vantage Data Centers committed to building one of Europe’s largest data centre campuses in the country. Investing more than £12 billion in UK data centres, Vantage will also create more than 11,500 jobs up and down the country.
Site readiness and local impact will also be key considerations to ensure communities can maximise the benefits that they will deliver. Several promising sites have already been identified through the UK Government's expression of interest process which opened in February, and further information on locations and timelines for delivery will be confirmed in due course.
The Compute Roadmap includes £1 billion to expand the UK’s AI Research Resource 20-fold over the next five years. When complete, the expansion will be hundreds of times more powerful than the world’s current leading supercomputers – giving users the ability to process complicated calculations in mere seconds and speeding up the UK’s ability to bring game-changing innovations online.
It will see the UK's compute capacity increase to 420 AI exaFLOP – the equivalent of one billion people spending 13,316 years doing what the full AIRR will do in one second. That means all one billion people would have needed to start calculating more than 108,000 years before Stonehenge was built – without taking a break.
