Sovereign AI Fund

Lord Ranger of Northwood Excerpts

Monday 1st June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lloyd of Effra (Lab)]

Public procurement through G-Cloud must deliver value for money, security, and effective public services. Suppliers are not selected or excluded purely on the basis of nationality where they meet operational security and value for money obligations. The commercialisation of the sovereign AI fund to make the Government an early customer for strategically important UK start-ups is ongoing across technical, commercial and government leads to ensure that a robust, flexible, and scalable option is available.

[Lord Ranger of Northwood (Con)]

My Lords, perhaps I could highlight that the biggest challenge I see is not just initial funding. We welcome what the sovereign AI fund will do to provide compute and help commercialisation at a start-up moment for British AI companies, but the tragedy that we are seeing right now is losing those companies to international funders and overseas platforms. Once they reach a point for scaling, what will the fund or the Government do to help retain them, so they remain headquartered in the UK and continue to succeed commercially here?

[Baroness Lloyd of Effra (Lab)]

The noble Lord is right. Our ambition is to make the UK the best place to start, to scale and to stay. That is not just for the AI sovereign fund, important though that is, but for the ecosystem. That is why we are investing in public compute, so that firms here will be able to access it, why we have our ambition for UK procurement and why we are looking at measures such as AI growth zones: to make this country one of the most attractive, as we can see from the amount of foreign direct investment that is already coming into the UK.