In the old Camden City Council, in front of the Stan Pancras station in London, away from the white tie and the tails of the flat in Windsor Castle, it was perhaps the most substantive show of the consequences of the state visit of Donald Trump.
In front of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, many members of the British and American cabinets and the cream of the European technology industry, a highly reproduced video, with the long history of the science of the United Kingdom. He included George Stephenson, Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing and Sir Demis Hassabis, with dozens of the United Kingdom starting companies from all corners of the country.
It was a cross between an investment promotion video of the United Kingdom and Danny Boyle 2012’s Olympic opening ceremony, with the exception of a crucial detail: it was expressed by Jensen Huang, American artificial intelligence (AI) Nvidia and Microchip’s tycoon.
This week, Trump said the technological tycoon “was taking the world” and the company’s head, which reached a market value of $ 4TN (£ 2.9tn) this summer, seems to have been everything in the United Kingdom in a quite extraordinary way.
Huang shouted the long list of British entrepreneurs that Nvidia has assumed and expanded after other 2 billion investments.
He invited Business Secretary Peter Kyle and his American counterpart Howard Lutnick on stage to go to British entrepreneurs gathered. Lutnick, the face of the global commercial war, said: “First we are the United States first, but we are not only in the United States … We want to win, we want you to win.”
This was a vignette of the surprising matrix of the world’s largest Silicon Valley technology companies that lit the Tap Transatlantic Investment.
The “Technological Bromance” embraced the United Kingdom this week with a multimillion-dollar investments hat-trick of Nvidia, Microsoft and Google.
It was an early victory for the government’s strategy to attract this type of investment to help transform Great Britain and the economy of the United Kingdom in the long term.
But it is not necessarily proof that this strategy will win to transform the economy, the standard of living and change the course of more general negative vibrations of the economy and politics.
In fact, the contagious enthusiasm of the United States technological giants over Great Britain shook with the most general air of pessimism floating throughout the country.
Huang himself said he was surprised by Great Britain of herself. “This is the week that I declare that the United Kingdom will be a superpower of AI,” he told me, accrediting Prime Minister and Kyle.
“You (the British) simply do not appreciate it. Come on. You are too humble,” he said pointing to the history and reality of technological research from the United Kingdom.
Microsoft announced an investment of £ 22 billion and the extension of the Stargate AI Plan, aimed at expanding AI infrastructure in the next four years, to the United Kingdom.
It is what Microsoft’s executive director, Satya Nadella, described as the way for AI to become a general purpose technology, such as electricity or internet. It already feels quite ubiquitous.
On Tuesday, the United Kingdom Chancellor Rachel Reeves opened the new Google Data Center in Essex with her president, Ruth Porat. Google had just announced an investment of £ 5 billion in this type of infrastructure and in Deepmind, the London -based AI company directed by the winner of the Nobel Prize Sir Demis Hassabis.
Porrat is one of the most connected business leaders in the world, born in Manchester, and regularly in presidential trade missions. Although he emphasized the “deep opportunity” for the United Kingdom, he also said he had “work to do.”
But in the middle of the optimistic talk, an surprising attack against the variety of US investments came from former deputy PM and Facebook senior executive, Sir Nick Clegg. Great Britain was “clinging to the skirts of Uncle Sam” with “Migajas of the Mesa del Valle de Silicon”.
“We not only import all its technology, but we also export all our good people and good ideas,” he said.
Although there was no explicit quid quid in terms of digital taxes or changes in the online security bill in the technological prosperity agreement signed this week, it is clear that the United Kingdom has a gentle degree of alignment with the approach of the US administration, especially when it comes to ia.
Lutnick explained to the start audience that he discarded the security initiatives of the AI ​​of the Biden era in favor of “leaning forward” in technology. The United Kingdom government has reflected some of these movements.
The general panorama here is that even the three American giants who put the lion’s participation in technological investment last week are worth $ 9TN in the US stock markets. UU. They are ready for some purchases, and considerable sums will come to the United Kingdom.
The plan is that the Silicon Valley Stardust will be sprayed in the Oxford-Cambridge-London scientific triangle, “and do not forget the open university in Milton Keynes,” Kyle said.
So what happens to the family lament of losing our best technology and not being able to grow the largest companies in the world?
Deepmind could be considered an example of that in a way. It was bought by Google for £ 400 million in 2014. However, another way of seeing it is that the new appreciation of the technological giant is partly due to Deepmind’s research in London on all aspects of border technology.
The recent increase in its action value to more than $ 3TN is based on the perception that it is no longer far behind in the career of AI.
Chip Designer Arm Holdings is the other United Kingdom champion who sold to foreign property. Its technology is essential for chips on almost all smartphones, including iPhones. There are suggestions that ARM can consider the manufacture of its own chips, since the West seeks to eliminate risk supply chains.
Sometimes it is forgotten that Huang was very close to buying arms in 2022, before the regulatory authorities investigated the agreement for competence under the previous conservative government.
When I raised this with Huang, he sighed: “They don’t remember me … I tried.”
Despite the important fundamental work in this area by carrying out the previous government, under Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt, it is clear that this company felt burned by its treatment, and was delighted to get involved when Kyle appeared in his shirt in Silicon Valley last year.
However, this can point out the eventual consequence of this United Kingdom technology joke. It can help explain the “Pro-Reception” address granted to regulators, including the shot of the CMA chair in January.
This American capital flood believes that a safe home in the United Kingdom is obtaining, at least, safer than anywhere else in Europe.
The consequences could be that the economy of the United Kingdom becomes a technological laboratory for the world, or perhaps mainly for American giants. The visit to the State certainly seemed to have a tone of the United Kingdom that linked forces with the United States in a long -term technological battle with China.
Huang said this was not a “zero sum game.” “President Trump wants to win and also does President XI. They may both can.”
Then, in its own terms, this week showed that the government successfully attracted a significant investment that will help grow the economy. That does not solve immediate challenges in public finances, for example, before the budget.
The United States, even San Francisco, for example, can show that AUGES fed by technology often leave many others behind.
There are obvious questions about the generalized deployment of AI that already affect certain industries and postgraduate entry level work. Before AI becomes a massive job creator, it will visibly cost those of employees, junior counters, legal and creative assistants.
But the greatest impulse could be a sense of optimism created for the United Kingdom.
The United Kingdom is now in AI. Great Britain will depend more and more on this American technology. But American giants, at the same time, need British knowledge. It could define the economy and the country in the coming decades.