Startup Carbon3.ai sets sights on building UK-wide sovereign 'national grid for AI'

by Caroline Donnelly, Senior Editor, UK

Startup Carbon3.ai is on a mission to help the UK government achieve its goal of building a sustainable and sovereign artificial intelligence (AI) compute resource that will run entirely from off-grid supplied sources of renewable energy.

The company, which was officially incorporated according to Companies House in June 2025, claims to have secured a "significant initial UK capital" investment to support its £1bn plan to create a "national grid for AI" spanning more than 30 sites across the UK.

Mick McNeil, co-founder and chief business officer at Carbon3.ai, said the UK will struggle to achieve its goal of becoming an AI superpower without a sovereign infrastructure behind it: "The UK can't lead in AI if it doesn't have a sovereign backbone that powers it. Carbon3.ai provides that backbone at national scale, and in doing so, it becomes the launchpad for sovereign innovation."

The Carbon3.ai proposition aligns with the government's rhetoric about wanting to build out sovereign AI datacentre capabilities in pursuit of its goal of positioning the UK as an AI superpower.

McNeil added: "AI is the new critical infrastructure, and to be trusted it must be sovereign, sustainable and scalable. With Carbon3.ai, the UK takes control of its AI future, securing the data, the energy and the economics that will define the next decade."

It will achieve this by building a nationwide mesh of UK-owned and operated datacentres combined with the deployment of an enterprise AI software stack that will be powered by off-grid renewable energy, the company said.

According to Carbon3.ai, this will create a distributed AI infrastructure with a capacity of more than 100,000 graphics processing units (GPUs) that can be scaled as demand rises.

"For customers, that means two things: every workload runs with a smaller carbon footprint and at a lower cost, thanks to our ability to generate affordable renewable power," said Carbon3.ai in a statement. "This will enable UK organisations in every region of the UK to access low-latency, high-performance AI compute for the first time."

Matt Harris, senior vice-president and managing director for UK and Ireland, Middle East and Africa at HPE, said meeting the demand for AI services is "the biggest opportunity and the toughest challenge" facing UK organisations today, adding: "Capturing this opportunity requires robust and scalable AI infrastructure that enables organisations to stay in control of their data and emissions.