A quartet of software and cloud specialists committed to spend a combined £6.3 billion on data centres and related infrastructure in the UK, investments the country’s government positioned as aiding faster deployment of AI in areas such as healthcare.

The UK’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology noted the pledges from US companies CyrusOne, ServiceNow, CloudHQ and CoreWeave took the amount committed to related infrastructure to more than £25 billion since the current government took office in July.

It added the “new data centres will provide the UK with more computing power and data storage”, providing “necessary infrastructure to train and deploy the next generation of AI technologies, such as complex machine learning models and algorithms”.

The sum breaks down as £1.9 billion for a CloudHQ campus in Oxfordshire; £2.5 billion from CyrusOne; CoreWeave promised £750 million to support “the next generation of AI cloud infrastructure”; and £1.2 billion from ServiceNow.

ServiceNow’s sum covers the expansion of existing data centres to include installation of Nvidia GPUs for local processing and new office space to house an increased workforce.

The government department noted the latest tranche of data centre-related promises followed other “major deals” in the segment.

These include a commitment from investment company Blackstone to spend £10 billion on an AI-focused data centre facility and a five-year plan by Amazon Web Services to splash £8 billion on similar facilities.