The public funds, sourced through taxpayer money, will be used to build a national AI resource in Britain, and be ordered through major chipmaking companies such as Intel, AMD and Nvidia, according to reports. 

The government is already in the advanced stages of an order of up to 5,000 graphics processing units (GPUs) from Nvidia, reported The Telegraph. 

The GPUs, also known as graphics cards, play a crucial part in a chip’s capacity for processing and are vital for performing complex actions such as those required by AI tools. One of the most famous of these, ChatGPT-4, was trained on as many as 25,000 Nvidia chips.

However, the amount pledged might not be enough to meet the government’s ambitions to transform the UK into an AI leader, particularly in comparison with investments in the US, EU and China.

Currently, the UK only accounts for 0.5 per cent of global semiconductor sales. 

Steven Mooney, CEO of FundMyPitch, said: “It’s encouraging to see a...