Missing money, shipped chips and a 350,000% profit: key takeaways on AI ‘phantom investments’

A Guardian investigation has put the UK government’s AI plans under the microscope. Here are the key details Revealed: UK’s multibillion AI drive is built on ‘phantom investments’ The Essex ‘supercomputer’ that’s still a scaffolding yard A Guardian investigation has examined a series of massive AI investments announced by the government over the past two years, comparing what was promised with what has so far been delivered. The investigation centres on two companies backed by the chipmaker Nvidia and central to the UK’s AI plans, Nscale and CoreWeave. It has found that large, promised sums do not represent real investments into the UK’s economy, that new datacentres are not in fact new, and that a giant supercomputer set to be online later this year is still being used by a construction company in Essex. Here are some of the key details at a glance. The Guardian visited a site in Essex that is supposed to host “one of the most powerful AI computing centres ever built”, built by Nscale. The government and Nscale say this supercomputer is supposed to be up by the end of this year. The site is still being used as a scaffolding yard by a different company. While