UCL chosen as UK partner to help develop sovereign AI platforms

As noted by Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer in his speech introducing the UK’s AI Action Plan at UCL in January 2025, AI is becoming increasingly important in diverse sectors, from healthcare to education. Nations are recognising the importance of having sovereign AI capability created by and for the benefit of the country, alongside the data centres and computing power needed to run them.

NVIDIA, which designs the chips that power generative AI platforms such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, announced that it will work with countries across Europe to help develop this capacity.

This will include training sovereign models more quickly and cheaply, and improving their accuracy to handle the demands of next generation AI systems that can perform complex, multi-stage tasks. It will also include collaborations between academic and industry researchers, and investment in NVIDIA hardware.

UCL was confirmed as the sole UK partner of the initiative, building on its strong existing relationship with NVIDIA, as well as its ongoing work in creating a UK designed and trained large language model (LLM). Called BritLLM, the model has been trained not only in English but also other languages spoken in the UK, such as Welsh.

Professor Pontus Stenetorp, Deputy Director of the UCL Centre for Artificial Intelligence, said: “In the past few years there has been an explosion in public and commercial interest in applying natural language processing (NLP) systems, which LLMs are a key component of, in academia, government, and industry. The technology promises to fundamentally change how humans interact with computers and enable large-scale automation of any task which involves the generation and processing of text or speech.

“To this end, in 2023 we launched the BritLLM project, an ongoing effort to produce training data, evaluation data, know-how, and open models aligned with UK interests. Our goal is to release competitive, open-source UK LLM models, while empirically quantifying the suitability of commercial and non-commercial models made available by other parties.”

BritLLM was trained on Isambard-AI, the UK’s newest and most powerful supercomputer, as part of the UK government’s investment in AI.

Professor Stenetorp added: “We have already been able to produce state-of-the-art, multilingual LLMs with the help of Isambard-AI and over the next few years it is our hope that with access to these resources we will be able to answer fundamental questions about how LLMs operate.

“For example, to what degree do LLMs generalise from, as opposed to memorise, their training data? This is a key question in order to answer how widespread the adoption and impact of current AI approaches will be. Furthermore, how do we better encourage information to flow between languages so that LLMs can become more multilingual and equitable? These are ambitious, difficult questions, but ones that we can hope to be able to answer within this decade.”

In recent years UCL has established itself as one of the UK’s leading centres for AI research, due to its pioneering academic leadership, cutting-edge facilities, doctoral training opportunities, and involvement with industry and government initiatives.

The UCL Centre for Artificial Intelligence, led by Professor David Barber, is internationally recognised for its work in machine learning, probabilistic modelling, and reinforcement learning.

UCL maintains strong partnerships with leading AI firms such as NVIDIA, Darktrace, Google DeepMind and Quantexa, as well as with the UK’s AI Safety Institute. These collaborations ensure that UCL’s research is not only theoretical, but is also applied to real-world challenges, including in cybersecurity, healthcare, education and finance.

For example, UCL’s partnership with NVIDIA includes creating deep generative models of the human brain in health and disease, drawing on large-scale, real-world data, with the aim of better understanding complex disease mechanisms and guiding precision medicine treatments.

Professor Parashkev Nachev, who leads this Wellcome-funded programme at UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology, said: “The rewards of AI are not merely about creating tools to automate tasks such as radiology, but about capturing the richness and complexity of human biology, so that we can closely tailor treatments to individuals.”

The NVIDIA announcement was made at London Tech Week 2025, held from 9-13 June, which attracted over 20,000 attendees from 80 countries.

It is envisaged that these open, sovereign models will provide a foundation for an integrated regional AI ecosystem that reflects local languages and culture, encompassing all of Europe’s 24 official languages.

Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, said: “Europe’s diversity is its superpower – an engine of creativity and innovation. Together with Europe’s model builders and cloud providers, we’re building an AI ecosystem where intelligence is developed and served locally to provide a foundation for Europe to thrive in the age of AI — transforming every industry across the region.”

Links

• Professor David Barber's academic profile
• Professor Parashkev Nachev's academic profile
• UCL Centre for Artificial Intelligence
• UCL Computer Science
• UCL Engineering
• UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology

Images

• Credit: gorodenkoff on iStock.

Media contact

Matt Midgley

Tel: +44 (0)20 3108 6995

Email: m.midgley [at] ucl.ac.uk