Question to the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade, what assessment he has made of the potential risks to UK AI capability arising from dependence on overseas providers of cloud computing services.

The Government is committed to scaling the UK’s domestic compute capacity to support national resilience and security, ensuring that the UK has the infrastructure needed to benefit from frontier AI. AI Growth Zones are central to this effort, helping to establish more compute capacity in the UK while creating opportunities for UK companies to participate in major AI infrastructure projects.

The Government also recognises that many cloud services used in the UK are delivered by internationally owned providers. We therefore focus on the resilience and security of the services on which the UK depends, rather than ownership alone. Our approach is to manage risks arising from concentration, dependencies and supply chains through regulatory oversight, operational resilience measures and a diverse cloud market.