As the UK government reiterates its vision of becoming an AI superpower, American data center operator CoreWeave has announced the construction of two new GPU data centers in the UK. These data centers are located in Crawley and Docklands, developed in collaboration with digital real estate companies Digital Realty and Global Switch. The total investment amounts to £1 billion (approximately $1.2 billion), marking CoreWeave's further expansion in the UK market.
Image Source Note: Image generated by AI, licensed from Midjourney
CoreWeave's Chief Business Officer, Mike Matacola, stated: "The UK is an important market for CoreWeave, where we have established our European headquarters and plan to further expand our business in the future. We are excited to collaborate with Digital Realty and Global Switch to provide next-generation AI infrastructure for the UK." However, despite the opening of new facilities, the highly anticipated latest Nvidia chips have not yet been deployed. These new data centers are equipped with H200 accelerators based on Nvidia's older Hopper architecture, while the latest Blackwell chips from Nvidia are expected to be available only in the fourth quarter of 2024.
The H200 is one of Nvidia's most advanced GPUs in the Hopper generation, featuring up to 141GB of HBM3e high-speed memory, with a memory bandwidth of 4.8TB per second and nearly 4 petaFLOPS of sparse FP8 performance. According to CoreWeave, with over 1TB of high-speed memory configuration per server, these data centers can better support the growing frontier AI models.
For instance, a single H200 system can now run Meta's latest Llama3.1405B model with full 16-bit precision, whereas previously, running this model required distributing it across two nodes or using 8-bit quantization to run on H100 systems. While CoreWeave has not disclosed the specific number of GPUs in the Crawley and Docklands data centers, its past deployments typically involved over 10,000 accelerators.
These two data centers are the latest achievements of CoreWeave's large-scale expansion over the past two years, reflecting its ambition to enter new markets. Last spring, CoreWeave announced London as its European headquarters and made an initial investment of £1 billion. Subsequently, at an international investment summit, the company's investment amount was raised to £1.75 billion (approximately $2.1 billion).
In this wave of AI enthusiasm, CoreWeave has secured billions in venture capital and debt financing, planning to launch 10 more data centers by the end of 2025. Currently, CoreWeave operates 28 data centers worldwide.
Meanwhile, the UK government is also accelerating its plans to become an AI superpower. Recently, the country released an AI Opportunity Action Plan, committing to adopt 50 recommendations proposed by venture capitalists, aiming to improve productivity by 1.5% annually through AI, which is expected to generate £47 billion (approximately $57 billion) in economic benefits each year. Despite these ambitious goals, the CEO of the National Grid has warned that supporting additional AI infrastructure may put pressure on the grid.
Key Points:
🌍 CoreWeave invests £1 billion in new GPU data centers in Crawley and Docklands.
💻 New facilities equipped with Nvidia H200 accelerators, yet to use the latest Blackwell chips.
📈 The UK government plans to leverage AI to boost productivity, creating £47 billion in economic benefits annually.
