Initial capital secured and over £1 billion planned for investment, Carbon3.ai’s nationwide AI Mesh will deploy 100,000 GPUs across its own land and power assets – generating renewable energy to deliver trusted and sustainable AI for UK enterprises and government.
Carbon3.ai, the UK-based AI solutions platform, has announced plans to launch the country’s first sustainable sovereign AI platform later this year. The platform will be a vertically integrated ecosystem combining renewable energy generation, a nationwide mesh of data centres, and an enterprise AI software stack. Supported by substantial initial UK capital and a £1 billion growth programme, and powered by the expertise and leading technologies of partners HPE, VAST Data and WWT, Carbon3.ai is positioning itself as the ‘National Grid for AI’, enabling UK businesses and government to adopt AI faster, more sustainably, and with full sovereignty.
The launch of Carbon3.ai coincides with the UK government’s multi-phase energy strategy, which aims to balance nuclear investment with renewable innovation to meet the rising power demands driven by AI. By focusing on renewable energy and sovereign ownership, Carbon3.ai aligns with these national priorities, offering a homegrown alternative to foreign-led nuclear projects and ensuring that the UK’s AI infrastructure grows responsibly, sustainably, and securely.
Designed to be both sovereign and sustainable, Carbon3.ai is UK-owned, UK-operated, and powered by off-grid renewable energy. For customers, this means each workload operates with a smaller carbon footprint and at lower cost, thanks to the company’s ability to generate affordable renewable power. Carbon3.ai is the first UK AI platform to pass verified carbon credits and genuine cost savings directly to its customers.
Through its distributed nationwide infrastructure, Carbon3.ai’s mesh is engineered to scale with the capacity to deploy over 100,000 next-generation GPUs across its sites. This will, for the first time, provide UK organisations in every region with access to low-latency, high-performance AI compute.
“The UK can’t lead in AI if it doesn’t have a sovereign backbone that powers it,” said Mick McNeil, Co-Founder & Chief Business Officer at Carbon3.ai. “Carbon3.ai provides that backbone at national scale, and in doing so, it becomes the launchpad for sovereign innovation. 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.”
To accelerate its mission and bring its solutions to market, Carbon3.ai is partnering with HPE and WWT to deploy HPE Private Cloud AI, an enterprise-grade AI factory solution co-developed with NVIDIA as part of the NVIDIA AI Computing by HPE portfolio. Featuring air-gapped management and solutions to ensure technological and operational sovereignty, HPE Private Cloud AI will allow enterprises and public sector organisations to deploy and scale AI securely and responsibly. The AI systems will be housed in HPE’s AI Mod PODs – modular data centres designed to be deployed in almost any location with power and connectivity.
HPE
“AI is the biggest opportunity and the toughest challenge facing UK organisations and capturing this opportunity requires robust and scalable AI infrastructure that enables organisations to stay in control of their data and emissions,” said Matt Harris, SVP & managing director for UK, Ireland, Middle East and Africa at HPE. “This new AI solutions platform and the national mesh of AI data centres are putting Carbon3.ai right at the core of the UK’s ambition of becoming an AI maker. By leveraging HPE’s leading, fully integrated AI factory solutions, together we can accelerate the path to market for UK customers with sovereign AI solutions that enable them to realize the full potential of the AI opportunity at any scale.”
VAST Data
VAST Data brings feature-rich data platform services that eliminate data management and storage complexity to Carbon3.ai’s sovereign AI Mesh. The VAST AI Operating System delivers the scalability, multi-tenancy, and performance isolation required to serve UK enterprises, government, and research workloads side by side.
“VAST and Carbon3.ai have come together to pioneer altogether new levels of data infrastructure efficiency and data mobility” said Jeff Denworth, Co-Founder of VAST Data. “The VAST AI Operating System introduces radical levels of infrastructure efficiency, which requires less power from Carbon3.ai’s renewable energy AI Mesh. By using VAST’s data federation capabilities we can transform the AI Mesh into a secure and unified nationwide data source to feed the United Kingdom’s most ambitious AI efforts. Our combined solution gives enterprises, government, and researchers an efficient and trusted platform that can usher the UK into a new age of automation.”
World Wide Technology (WWT)
“Carbon3.ai’s strategic ambition to operationalise sovereign AI infrastructure across their 30+ sites will position the UK as an AI powerhouse on the global scene“, said Scott O’Mara, SVP of WWT’s International business. “The launch of this unique capability comes at a pivotal time for the UK and through jointly delivering AI blueprints and enterprise ready AI solutions, we will enable customers to accelerate AI adoption with confidence, combining sovereign infrastructure with proven architectures that deliver measurable outcomes at scale.”
The launch comes at a pivotal moment as governments and enterprises grapple with the dual challenge of harnessing AI at scale while meeting climate and sovereignty requirements. By delivering a platform that is at once AI-ready, green, and sovereign, Carbon3.ai aims to ensure that the UK becomes a global leader in trusted AI adoption.
