00:00 Speaker A
Microsoft announcing a major investment in the United Kingdom, just before President Trump is set to land in the UK for a state visit. Microsoft president and vice chair, Brad Smith, saying in a statement, the investment will total $30 billion over four years, saying it is the largest investment in the country ever. Half the investment is on building out the UK’s cloud and AI infrastructure. Microsoft CEO Sati Nadella also speaking in a new video, saying the company is committed to creating new opportunities on both sides of the Atlantic. This announcement is the latest in a string of similar moves from American companies ahead of the president’s trip. Alphabet just announced, you remember, a $6.8 billion investment on Monday.
00:50 Speaker A
Dan Howley, still with me. Dan, the Howley take on these headlines. What do you make of it?
00:54 Dan Howley
Uh look, I think that, you know, one of the things that uh if you look at, we have the the Microsoft uh 30 billion, 15 billion going to capital expenditures, uh 23,000 advanced GPUs. Uh no real name there as to uh which ones they are, but they say they’re working with N scale to to build them out. Uh it would be the largest uh supercomputer in the UK. Uh and I think, you know, one of the things to look at first and foremost is this isn’t, you know, the first time a European country’s gotten this kind of uh play when it comes to AI and companies looking to build out AI. France uh had their own conference where there was a lot of talk of building out their AI uh over the summer. The other thing is, obviously this is uh a race to see who could have released their their uh announcements first, either Google or Microsoft. Google with their uh 5 billion pound announcement, which works out to about $6.8 billion. Uh Microsoft coming later but just kind of dunking on them saying, oh, we got 30 billion. What’s what’s going on there? Um, and I I do think it also though speaks to how important it is to not just have AI business in the US, but to building it out globally. You got to think these things are just like regular data centers, right? You you need to connect, you need to connect at the speed of light. The further away something is, the more time it’s going to take to get an answer. People in the UK want to get answers. They don’t want to have to wait for something to come from Ohio. So they build them there. So we’re going to see more of these buildouts across the globe and I think that this is just just the start of it.
02:26 Speaker A
All right, thank you, Dan. Appreciate it.
