Microsoft Marks Its Largest UK Investment With Major Focus On AI Development

After Microsoft MSFT President Brad Smith dismissed the development of any super-intelligent Artificial Intelligence (AI) within the next 12 months, the tech giant announced a $3.2 billion investment in the U.K.

What Happened: Microsoft's U.K. investment is for artificial intelligence infrastructure and training, which will be spread over the upcoming three years. This marks the company's largest investment in the U.K. since it started doing business in the country 40 years ago.

The investment will bring more than 20,000 of the most advanced GPUs to the U.K. by 2026 by growing its data center footprint across sites in London and Cardiff and a potential expansion into northern England.

The company also announced a multimillion-dollar investment for training one million people with the skills required to build and work with AI.

“The program will focus on building AI fluency, developing AI technical skills, supporting AI business transformation, and promoting safe and responsible AI development and use,” Smith wrote in a company blog.

Why It Matters: This infrastructure investment will assist in meeting the rapidly increasing demand for efficient, scalable, and sustainable AI-specific computing power. It will also assist private and public sectors to leverage the latest cloud and AI breakthroughs.

A U.K. government website in a blog post cited Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt, saying, “The U.K. is the tech hub of Europe with an ecosystem worth more than that of Germany and France combined – and this investment is another vote of confidence in us as a science superpower.”

The news follows the Chancellor's announcement of a further £500 million investment in advanced computing for AI at the Autumn Statement, taking the U.K.’s total planned public investment in computing to more than £1.5 billion.

Read More: Microsoft Is Challenged By Amazon's Trainium2 Chip While Their Stock Is Up 57% Year-To-Date

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