Startup Carbon3.ai is on a mission to help the British government achieve its goal of building a sustainable and sovereign artificial intelligence (AI) resource calculator that will run entirely on off-grid renewable energy sources delivered.
The company, which was formally incorporated under Companies House in June 2025, claims to have secured “significant initial UK capital” to support its £1 billion plan to build a “national network of AI” spanning more than 30 sites across the UK.
Mick McNeil, co-founder and chief business officer of Carbon3.ai, said that the UK will struggle to achieve its goal of becoming an AI superpower without a sovereign infrastructure behind it: “The UK cannot lead AI if it doesn’t have a sovereign backbone that can do it.
The Carbon3.AI proposal is in line with the government’s rhetoric about wanting to build sovereign AI data centre capabilities to achieve 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, Britain is taking control of its AI future, delivering the data, energy and economy that will define the next decade.”
It will achieve this by building a country home to UK-owned and operated data centers, combined with the deployment of the company’s AI software stack, which 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 over 100,000 graphics processing units (GPUs), which can be scaled down as demand increases.
“For customers, this means two things: every workload runs with a lower carbon footprint and at a lower cost, thanks to our ability to generate affordable renewable energy,” Carbon3.ai said in a statement. “This will allow UK organizations in every region of the UK to access low-latency, high-performance AI compute for the first time.”
Technology partners involved in the project include Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE), World Wide Technology (WWT), and NVIDIA, who will collaborate to create HPE private cloud AI environments that will be located in HPE’s modular data center setup.
“With airlift management …[this] enables enterprises and government agencies to safely and responsibly deploy and scale AI,” Carbon3.ai said in a statement. “The AI systems will be deployed in HPE AI mod pods, modular datacenters that can be placed almost anywhere there is power and connectivity.”
Matthew Harris, senior vice president and managing director of UK and Ireland, Middle East and Africa at HPE, said today’s demand for AI services is the “biggest opportunity and toughest challenge” facing UK organisations today, adding: “Seizing this opportunity requires a robust and scalable AI infrastructure that allows organisations to retain control of their data and emissions.”
“This new AI solutions platform and national network of AI data centres puts Carbon3.ai right on track to become the UK’s AI maker. With HPE’s leading, fully integrated AI factory solutions, together we can accelerate the path to UK customers with any sovereign AI solutions that enable them to fully realise the potential of AI at any scale.”
