President Donald Trump’s visit to the UK this week is expected to be accompanied by billions of dollars of announced investment in both data centers and nuclear energy to power them, with money coming from some of America's largest financial and technology firms.
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BlackRock plans to spend $700M developing data center infrastructure across the UK, Sky News reports, an investment the asset management giant is expected to announce after Trump arrives in the country on Tuesday.
The data center build-out would be executed through a new venture being launched by BlackRock, branded as Digital Gravity Partners.
This isn't BlackRock’s first foray into funding large-scale data center development efforts. In 2024, the firm launched a partnership with Microsoft, Global Infrastructure Partners and MGX known as the Global AI Infrastructure Investment Partnership, which aimed to invest as much as $100B in U.S. data centers.
According to Sky News, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink will be part of the business delegation traveling with the president on his trip to the UK, along with Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
OpenAI will reportedly announce its own UK data center spending spree during Trump’s visit: The ChatGPT creator and chipmaker Nvidia are expected to jointly unveil billions in data center investment. The two tech giants are partnering with data center and artificial intelligence infrastructure company NScale to build new facilities.
London-based NScale is a startup that has been operational for less than two years but is already looking to raise billions of dollars of debt and equity to build out UK and European data centers. It has pledged to invest $2.5B (£1.8B) in UK data centers over the next three years. In January, it bought a site in Loughton, Essex — east of London — which it said could house up to 45,000 of Nvidia’s GB200 super chips.
In addition to data center development deals, Britain and the U.S. are also expected to announce a wide-ranging agreement on nuclear energy cooperation during Trump’s state visit, Reuters reports. The anticipated agreement will aim to accelerate nuclear projects and investment in the UK by U.S. firms, with much of the focus on advanced nuclear technologies — often referred to as Small Modular Reactors or microreactors — that have long been touted as a key part of the answer to the data center industry’s increasingly acute power woes.
The past week saw several nuclear partnerships between U.S. and British firms in connection with the bilateral agreement. Among them are an £11B project being pursued by Holtec International, EDF and Tritax to develop SMR-powered data centers at a retired coal plant in Nottinghamshire, and plans by Bill Gates-backed TerraPower to explore UK locations for its reactors.
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