EU Technological Sovereignty Package

Lord Markham Excerpts

Monday 20th July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Markham (Con)]

My Lords, as someone who has experienced a few PM changes myself, I genuinely wish all the Ministers good luck and thank them for the work that they have done—I know how hard it is. Technological sovereignty ultimately depends not on where AI is regulated but on who owns the compute cloud infrastructure and frontier models. What proportion of government AI investment is building genuine UK-owned capability, rather than further increasing our dependence on overseas hyperscale cloud providers?

[Baroness Lloyd of Effra (Lab)]

The Government are taking the approach of reducing overreliance and building up our own capability. We welcome foreign investment, including in our AI growth zones, and the ability of UK companies and citizens to access the best technology available, whether it is in the UK or elsewhere. That is an important part of our being able to benefit from the developments in AI. However, I absolutely agree that AI compute is the engine behind every AI breakthrough. That is why we are investing up to £2 billion in public compute infrastructure to 2030, so that researchers, start-ups, SMEs and public services can have free access to the computing power they need to work at the frontier of AI.