Sovereign AI Fund

Baroness Berger Excerpts

Monday 1st June 2026 Lords Chamber

[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.

[Baroness Berger (Lab)]

My Lords, France, Germany, South Korea, Switzerland, Singapore, Canada and Ukraine are all investing in their own sovereign AI models, for a variety of reasons, including data control, data protection and, most importantly, economic competitiveness. What consideration are the Government giving to using the sovereign AI fund to invest in the UK’s own sovereign AI model?

[Baroness Lloyd of Effra (Lab)]

As I mentioned just now, the sovereign AI fund is one of the components of how we think about UK strength. With it, we are looking at where we can have a UK strategic advantage. The five main priority areas that we have outlined are compute efficiency and sovereign architecture, next-generation AI labs and model development, AI for health and life sciences, AI for scientific discovery, and AI for trust, integrity and assurance.