Tech
UK government signs US partnership to deliver Europe’s largest AI factory | Computer Weekly
To tie in with US president Donald Trump’s state visit, the UK and US have agreed to the Tech Prosperity Deal, to boost the development and deployment of artificial intelligence (AI), quantum and nuclear technologies.
Building on the £44bn UK government investment in the AI and tech sector and a commitment to invest a total of £31bn from Microsoft, Nvidia, Google, OpenAI and CoreWeave, Labour is aiming to make the UK Europe’s largest gigafactory.
As part of the pact, the UK and US will unite to forge joint research schemes to further the use of AI to allow for targeted treatments and other shared priorities, such as fusion energy. This could see both countries working together to build AI models for life-changing breakthroughs such as targeted treatments for those suffering with cancer or rare and chronic diseases.
Parliamentary under-secretary of state for the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology Kanishka Narayan described the agreement as “the first-ever UK-US tech deal”. “I think it has the potential to transform lives right across Britain,” he added.
When asked about the lack of sufficient onshore tech skills, Narayan said: “The starting point is that Britain has amazing talent already.”
Along with the skills across universities, researchers and AI startups, he also spoke about Labour’s 50-point AI opportunities plan. “We are going to be laser-sharp focused on the execution of the skills element,” said Narayan. “We’ve been focused on making sure that we are getting people to invest in British talent and British firms.”
Among the goals he sees for the UK-US tech partnership is “to convince the very best founders across the world that Britain is the right place for them to build”. To achieve this, Narayan said the government is working with UK startup Nscale to deploy Europe’s largest graphics processing unit (GPU) clusters.
According to Narayan, Nvidia has committed to supply 120,000 GPUs to the UK over the next 12 months. “We’re announcing to every talented founder across the world that Britain now has a scale of compute availability, one fundamental input that gives them the confidence to build here,” he said.
Narayan said OpenAI will deploy 8,000 GPUs in the first phase. This is projected to grow up to 60,000 Nvidia Grace Blackwell Ultra GPUs. Microsoft is also committed to investing £22bn, including 23,000 advanced GPUs, to deliver the UK’s largest AI supercomputer, in Loughton. Both of these deals also involve Nscale, which recently announced it was building an OpenAI Stargate project in Norway, using 100,000 Nvidia chips.
There is also the £5bn Google has invested in a datacentre facility in Waltham Cross.
Narayan said the opportunity for the UK was not only in building out sovereign compute at scale, but also to make the UK the world’s best place for the uptake and deployment of AI to help improve people’s lives.
Prime minister Keir Starmer said: “By teaming up with world-class companies from both the UK and US, we’re laying the foundations for a future where together we are world leaders in the technology of tomorrow, creating highly skilled jobs, putting more money in people’s pockets and ensuring this partnership benefits every corner of the United Kingdom.”
This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Fueled by unusually warm waters, Hurricane Melissa this week turned into one of the strongest Atlantic storms ever recorded. Now a new rapid attribution study suggests human-induced climate change made the deadly tropical cyclone four times more likely.
Hurricane Melissa collided with Jamaica on Tuesday, wreaking havoc across the island before tearing through nearby Haiti and Cuba. The storm, which reached Category 5, reserved for the hurricanes with the most powerful winds, has killed at least 40 people across the Caribbean so far. Now weakened to a Category 2, it continues its path toward Bermuda, where landfall is likely on Thursday night, according to the National Hurricane Center.
Early reports of the damage are cataclysmic, particularly in hardest-hit western Jamaica. Winds reaching speeds of 185 miles per hour and torrential rain flattened entire neighborhoods, decimated large swaths of agricultural lands and forced more than 25,000 people—locals and tourists alike—to seek cover in shelters or hotel ballrooms. According to the new attribution study from Imperial College London, climate change ramped up Melissa’s wind speeds by 7 percent, which increased damages by 12 percent.
Losses could add up to tens of billions of dollars, experts say.
The findings echo similar reports released earlier this week on how global warming contributed to the likelihood and severity of Hurricane Melissa. Each of the analyses add to a growing body of research showing how ocean warming from climate change is fueling the conditions necessary for stronger tropical storms.
Hurricane Melissa is “kind of a textbook example of what we expect in terms of how hurricanes respond to a warming climate,” said Brian Soden, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Miami, who was not involved in the recent analyses. “We know that the warming ocean temperatures [are] being driven almost exclusively by increasing greenhouse gases.”
The storm has disrupted every aspect of life in this part of the Caribbean.
“There’s been massive dislocation of services. We have people living in shelters across the country,” Dennis Zulu, United Nations resident coordinator in Jamaica, said in a press conference on Wednesday. “What we are seeing in preliminary assessments is a country that’s been devastated to levels never seen before.”
The Climate Connection
For the rapid attribution study, researchers at Imperial College used the peer-reviewed Imperial College Storm Model, known as IRIS, which has created a database of millions of synthetic tropical cyclone tracks that can help fill in gaps on how storms operate in the real world.
The model essentially runs simulations on the likelihood of a given storm’s wind speed—often the most damaging factor—in a pre-industrial climate versus the current climate. Applying IRIS to Hurricane Melissa is how the researchers determined that human-induced warming supercharged the cyclone’s wind speed by 7 percent.
Tech
Gear News of the Week: Withings Launches Its Pee Scanner, and Samsung Shows Off a Trifold Phone
A few weeks ago, bathroom and plumbing company Kohler debuted the Dekoda, a health and wellness sensor that lives on your toilet bowl and records signs of your gut health and hydration. Now, Withings has launched the U-Scan. First shown at CES in 2023, the U-Scan also sits inside the toilet bowl. A thermal sensor detects when a fresh, er, sample is being deposited. The U-Scan takes a small sample and analyzes it on-site with miniature biochemical sensors inside an interchangeable cartridge.
There are two separate U-Scans. U-Scan Nutrio analyzes your diet, checking for biomarkers like bio-acidity, hydration status, and ketone levels, which shows that you’ve started burning body fat instead of sugar. U-Scan Calci also checks for calcium, which is a sign that you might have kidney stones. Results are then transmitted via Wi-Fi to the Withings app.
The cartridges are replaceable, and the sensor comes with a docking station to clean and recharge the sensor. Purchasing the U-Scan comes with a complimentary subscription to Withings+, the company’s upgraded app, which also includes a free consultation with a nutritionist.
The U-Scan packages start at $380, which comes with one U-Scan, either Nutrio or Calci, one cartridge, and two to four scans weekly (each cartridge lasts about 2.5 months). For more intensive monitoring, the Intensive package includes two cartridges for five to seven weekly measurements. Replacement cartridges are $100 for one cartridge or $180 for two, and Withings sends you the cartridge automatically depending on which package you select. The U-Scan is now available at Withings.com. We’ll be testing it soon. —Adrienne So
Samsung Brings Its Browser to Windows, and Teases a Trifold Phone
Samsung has long offered its own browser on its smartphones—Samsung Internet—but now the app is finally available on another platform: Windows. Considering Samsung makes Windows laptops and Android phones, this move allows folks who use the company’s browser to share their browsing history and bookmarks between phone and laptop, and if you have saved passwords with Samsung Pass, you can use it to autofill passwords on websites.
The company is taking this opportunity to bring some Galaxy AI features over as well, including Browsing Assist, which lets you instantly summarize webpages or translate them to another language. Samsung says its browser also blocks third-party web trackers, and there’s a Privacy Dashboard that lets you see what has been blocked.
Samsung Internet for PC is only available as a beta right now, but anyone in the US or South Korea on Windows 11 or Windows 10 (version 1809 and above) can download it now.
South Korean President Lee tries to ease tensions with North Korea, seeks China’s help
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Climate Change Made Hurricane Melissa 4 Times More Likely, Study Suggests
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