The UK government plans to make 'strategic purchases' of AI chips directly from British semiconductor firms to prevent them from being acquired by foreign buyers or relocating abroad. Technology Secretary Liz Kendall will announce the initiative at London Tech Week, targeting a 5% global chip market share worth roughly £37 billion. The government has already committed £100 million through ARIA's compute programme, including a £50 million inference lab for UK startups. The move follows a string of high-profile losses — SoftBank's acquisition of Graphcore, Qualcomm's purchase of Alphawave IP, and Arm's New York listing — and aims to create guaranteed domestic demand by making the government a customer rather than just a regulator. Concerns about over-reliance on US firms like Palantir, Microsoft, and AWS in public procurement are also driving the push for domestic providers.
