Sovereign AI Fund
(asked on 9th October 2026) - View Source
Question to the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade:
To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade, how many companies have received compute allocations from the Sovereign AI Unit; how many GPU-hours in total; and what the notional value of those hours is.
Answered by
Kanishka Narayan
Minister of State (Cabinet Office) (Jointly with the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Technology)
This question was answered on 23rd October 2026
- Sovereign AI investment decisions are overseen by the British Technology Investments (BTI) Board, pending the establishment of the Sovereign AI Investment Committee. The most recent Board meeting took place in the week commencing 28th September.
- Since its launch in April, Sovereign AI has publicly announced seven direct investments into British AI startups: Callosum, Ineffable Intelligence, Isomorphic Labs, CuspAI, Olix, Basecamp Research and, most recently, Augur. Further investments have been approved and will be announced in due course.
- The Sovereign AI Fund has awarded compute to 22 companies across the UK AI ecosystem with around 6.5 million GPU hours on Isambard-AI allocated to date.
- The Fund does not deploy private capital directly, but aims to crowd in private capital via follow-on investment into supported companies.
- At launch in April 2026 the headcount at Sovereign AI was 12. Sovereign AI is currently growing to a projected headcount of c.30 by March 2027. This includes teams covering investments, R&D schemes, policy and operations.