UK cloud provider Civo plans to build 40 edge datacenters to bring sovereign artificial intelligence services closer to customers. The first site is due to open in Hertfordshire by March 2027.
The longer term target is 1 gigawatt of capacity across the country. Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 systems will provide the computing power to run artificial intelligence applications from UK owned facilities.
The Hertfordshire site is expected to open with 8 megawatts of capacity and eventually expand to 38 megawatts. Civo says it has secured five further sites in Lancashire, Greater Manchester, London, and Oxfordshire. These locations are expected to bring the total to 150 megawatts within three years.
Chief executive Mark Boost shared survey results at the firm Civo Navigate event in London. For the past two years, the company surveyed 1,000 UK IT leaders about artificial intelligence sovereignty. Last year, 61 percent said it was a strategic priority, and this year that figure rose to 73 percent.
Civo is pitching its UK ownership to customers wary of relying on US controlled cloud providers. The US CLOUD Act adds to those worries because it allows American authorities to seek data from US companies even when it is stored in datacenters overseas.
A recent report found that at least 80 percent of UK businesses using cloud services depend on AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud. Your data sits in a UK building, but the company is owned and controlled from overseas. That means your data remains subject to foreign laws.
Boost noted that sovereignty is not just about where data sits. It involves who holds the data and who they answer to. In uncertain geopolitical times, concerns are growing around who holds the digital kill switch.
The kill switch concern is not entirely theoretical. In June, a US export control directive prompted Anthropic to suspend access to two of its advanced models. The controls were lifted later that month, but the episode showed how abruptly access to a US hosted service could change.
Civo also argues that placing capacity closer to customers will reduce the delay between an artificial intelligence request and its response. Nvidia estimates that inference accounts for about 35 percent of artificial intelligence workloads today and could reach 60 to 65 percent by 2030.
Civo claims it will be among the first cloud providers in the UK to offer the Vera Rubin platform once its Hertfordshire site is operational. It is taking orders now, alongside existing capacity on Nvidia older B300, B200, H100, and H200 instances. Early access pricing for Vera Rubin starts at $10 per hour.
