BT, Nscale, and Nvidia announce UK sovereign AI partnership
Nscale will construct the data centres at existing BT infrastructure sites; BT will provide connectivity. Both companies are founding members of the new UK Sovereign AI Industry Forum. The deal deepens Nscale’s position as a central plank of the UK government’s national AI infrastructure strategy.
BT Group and Nscale announced on 23 April 2026 that they are partnering to deliver sovereign AI data centres in the UK using Nvidia’s full-stack AI infrastructure. Under the arrangement, Nscale will build up to 14 megawatts of AI data centre capacity across three existing strategic BT sites in the UK.
BT will provide the infrastructure and connectivity underpinning those sites. The three specific locations have not been disclosed. The partnership extends BT Business’s sovereign platform to offer new AI services for both the private and public sector, framed around regulatory compliance, data residency, and security requirements for UK-based organisations.
The deal is significantly less for its raw capacity figure, 14MW is a relatively modest initial deployment by hyperscale standards, than for what it represents structurally. BT owns and operates the backbone of the UK’s fixed telecommunications network through its Openreach division, with physical infrastructure distributed across the country.
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Co-locating AI data centres with existing BT network exchange and switching sites would allow Nscale to deliver low-latency AI compute close to BT’s national fibre grid without the capital cost and planning delays of greenfield builds.
For BT, the partnership provides a commercial AI revenue stream from infrastructure built for voice and broadband, now being repurposed for AI compute, a structural monetisation of the network estate in the context of AI demand.
Nscale, founded in 2024 by Australian entrepreneur Josh Payne and headquartered in London, has grown with extraordinary speed into one of the central actors in the UK’s AI infrastructure build-out.
The company raised $2 billion in a Series C in March 2026, valuing it at $14.6 billion, with Nvidia as a strategic investor alongside Aker ASA, Citadel, Dell, Nokia, Jane Street, and Point72 among others.
Nvidia invested £500 million in Nscale in September 2025, describing the company as a “national champion for the UK.”
Nscale’s board now includes former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg, former UK Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, and former Yahoo President Susan Decker.
Nscale is already deeply embedded in the UK government’s AI infrastructure agenda. In September 2025, alongside Nvidia and OpenAI, it announced Stargate UK, an overarching infrastructure platform for sovereign AI workloads using Nvidia Blackwell Ultra GPUs in Nscale’s UK data centres.
Together with Microsoft, it is building what will be the UK’s largest AI supercomputer on its AI Campus in Loughton, Essex: a 50MW facility scalable to 90MW, initially housing 23,040 Nvidia GB300 GPUs and delivering from Q1 2027.
The company has also struck a $14 billion GPU infrastructure agreement with Microsoft covering approximately 200,000 Nvidia GB300 chips across sites in the US, Portugal, and Norway.
The BT deal is the latest in a series of partnerships that frame Nscale as the preferred UK-sovereign counterpart to US hyperscalers.
Where Amazon, Microsoft, and Google build their own data centres globally and serve UK customers from those assets, Nscale’s proposition is that it provides AI compute under UK control, keeping sensitive data and operations within the country’s borders.
That framing is reinforced by both companies’ membership in the new UK Sovereign AI Industry Forum, alongside Nvidia, a coalition working with the government on AI infrastructure, skills, and startup ecosystem development.
AI Minister Kanishka Narayan welcomed the announcement, citing the UK government’s AI Opportunities Action Plan.
Tom Burke, Chief Revenue Officer of Nscale, said the partnership was a “major milestone” in supporting the UK’s AI ambitions. Jon James, CEO of BT Business, said the collaboration reflected BT’s position as “the digital backbone of the UK” and “the only provider with the scale, capabilities and experience to enable the nation’s sovereign ambitions.” Anthony Hills, NVIDIA’s Director for the UK and Ireland, described telecommunications as “at the core of sovereign AI.”
