Two university-led research labs are to share up to £60 million of government money in a bid to make artificial intelligence cheaper to run, more dependable and far easier for ordinary British businesses to adopt, ministers have announced.
The labs, hosted by the University of Oxford and University College London, will be tasked with building the foundations for the next wave of AI breakthroughs on home soil, rather than leaving the field to a handful of deep-pocketed American technology giants. Backed by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and given access to large-scale computing power worth tens of millions of pounds, the two centres represent a deliberate attempt to compete on ideas rather than raw spending power.
For the small and mid-sized firms that make up the backbone of the UK economy, the pitch is straightforward. Much of today’s most capable AI is expensive to run and concentrated in the hands of a few model providers. The new labs are being asked to change the underlying economics, developing open-source tools that can run on widely available hardware, potentially including ordinary consumer computers, and rethinking how AI systems learn so they no longer demand vast, centralised data centres.
The first, the Science of Fundamental AI Research (SOFAIR) Lab, will be led by Professor David Barber at UCL, working alongside the universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Edinburgh. It will pull together researchers from computer science, mathematics, statistics and neuroscience to design new kinds of AI system, with the explicit aim of making advanced tools cheaper and more accessible.
“While current AI systems are impressive, many still suffer from basic issues such as inaccurate responses to questions,” said Professor Barber. “These systems often use similar underlying architectures, so SOFAIR will bring together the broader sciences and fresh ideas to create a new generation of open-source models. This will reduce dependency on the small number of model providers, boosting UK sovereignty and its position as a global player in AI.”
The second, the British Open-ended Learning and Discovery (BOLD) Lab, will be led by Professor Jakob Foerster at Oxford, with UCL and Imperial College London. Its focus is on how machines learn in the first place, building systems that can adapt to new situations, navigate physical spaces and turn research into practical tools for workplaces, infrastructure and public services.
Professor Foerster was blunt about the strategy. “The UK cannot win the global AI race simply by trying to outspend the largest technology companies on data and compute,” he said. “BOLD is about a different route: discovering fundamentally new ways to build AI that are more efficient, more open and better aligned with human needs.”
The political framing is as much about security as it is about productivity. AI Minister Kanishka Narayan said Britain could “set the agenda for what comes next”, arguing that building the capability at home reduces reliance on others and strengthens national resilience. The timing was pointed, with the announcement made on what would have been Alan Turing’s 114th birthday.
Professor Charlotte Deane, who chairs the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and is senior responsible owner for the UKRI AI Programme, said the UK was “one of the few countries in the world with all the right ingredients, from a deep pool of top AI experts to world-class universities”, and that the labs would back “the bold, high-reward ideas that can shape the future of AI”.
That ambition sits alongside a string of recent state interventions in the sector, from a headline AI investment package aimed at driving growth and jobs to funding for shared supercomputing capacity that gives researchers and start-ups access to advanced compute. The thread running through all of it is access: the gap between firms that can afford frontier AI and those that cannot.
The case made by the labs lands directly on a problem business owners already recognise. AI is no longer the preserve of large enterprises, and a growing number of smaller firms are finding ways to harness the technology without breaking the bank. Cheaper, open-source models that run on modest hardware would push that door wider still, lowering the cost of entry for the firms least able to absorb six-figure compute bills.
The money, made available through EPSRC, will run over the next six years. Each lab will also receive £2 million earmarked for hiring at least 10 doctoral students, part of a wider effort to grow domestic talent, and both will work alongside the Alan Turing Institute and UKRI’s existing AI research hubs. The commitment, set out in full on GOV.UK, goes further than first planned, doubling the number of labs from one to two and lifting the total from £40 million to up to £60 million. It forms part of UKRI’s broader £1.6 billion AI strategy to strengthen the UK’s position over the next four years.
Whether that translates into cheaper tools on the desks of British SMEs will take years to judge. But the direction of travel is clear: the government is betting that the route to broad adoption runs through cost, not just capability.
