£1.3 billion for UK Tech and AI plans scrapped by Labour Government

Following on from Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ warning that ‘tough decisions’ need to be made to plug the £22 billion deficit in the former Government’s spending, today it was announced that £1.3 billion pounds of funding promised by the Conservatives for Tech and AI projects has been cut. The projects affected include 800 million to Edinburgh University for the creation of an exascale supercomputer and 500 million to AI Research Resource, aimed at funding computing for AI.

Latest figures from Tech Nation showed the UK tech sector to have a market value of $1.1 trillion (£863 billion) in the first quarter of this financial year and the AI ‘boom’ is pushing fuelling movement across the markets. Some critics call the move short-sighted, limiting development in a sector that is poised to grow globally. This funding was only announced in the last 12 months. However, according to the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), the money may have been promised but it was never allocated within the departmental budget. Shadow Secretary Andrew Griffin has refuted this claiming that at the time of election, the department was set to underspend.

The exascale supercomputer was considered a priority project by the previous government and the University of Edinburgh has already spent £31 million on housing the project. Expected to be 50 times faster than any current computers in the UK, the Exascale would have had applications that included ‘artificial intelligence, drug discovery and climate change.’ What this means for the future of the project is unclear, but the University has said that ‘it is ready to work with the government to support the next phase of this technology.’

A Government spokesman assured that this government was still prioritizing developing the tech sector, highlighting an announcement last week by the DSIT, that Matt Clifford, (an organizer of the AI Safety Summit), had been appointed to find new AI opportunities and advise the government on how to support them, as an indication of this commitment. Following Reeve's warning of tax increases to come in the October budget, this is simply one of the ‘difficult and necessary’ decisions the government was being forced to make.

(Source: bbc.co.uk)