Google Expands AI Business in the U.K.

Google is strengthening its AI business in the U.K. with significant investments and partnerships. On Monday, Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, and Thomas Kurian, Google Cloud CEO, outlined the company’s plans in London, alongside key customers BT and WPP.

Google has announced the expansion of its UK data residency to include Agentspace, enabling enterprises to host AI agents built on Google infrastructure locally. This development addresses concerns of organizations wary of hosting data outside their purview.

Additionally, Google is introducing financial incentives for AI startups, offering up to £280,000 in Google Cloud credits to those joining its new UK accelerator, as well as expanded AI skills training.

The company also announced that Chirp 3, its audio generation model developed at DeepMind, will be added to its Vertex AI developer platform. More information on this development can be found here.

The concept of “Agentic” has emerged as a key term in the practical adoption of AI by enterprises, focusing on building AI agents that can assist people in their work and enhance customer interactions.

Agentspace, Google’s platform for building these AI assistants, features NotebookLM for enterprises, a service capable of ingesting large amounts of information and summarizing it. Other notable features include multimodal search and the use of generative AI for building AI agents.

Google initially launched Agentspace as a beta in December 2024 and announced data residency for the UK in October 2024, allowing organizations to store data at-rest, train AI, and run inference on Gemini 1.5 Flash within the U.K. Today’s announcement brings Agentspace into the UK data residency region.

The primary goal is to encourage more businesses to partner with Google for their AI services, addressing trust issues related to data handling in the cloud. As data remains a valuable commodity, Google aims to provide a secure and reliable environment for AI development.

According to IDC analyst Mick Heys, many European organizations are hesitant to use AI in the public cloud due to concerns about data security, privacy, and sovereignty.

Thomas Kurian assured that customers will have full control over their data, addressing these concerns.

Long-time partners BT and WPP joined Google on stage, discussing their adoption of AI services, including the use of Imagen, Veo, and Gemini.

BT CEO Allison Kirby highlighted the potential of AI in transforming operations, citing examples such as detecting phone scams and improving customer service.

Google is currently on a development spree with its AI business, having recently launched Gemini 2.0, which enables multimodal generation and understanding in real-time.

The U.K. government is also investing heavily in AI development, with plans to adopt more generative AI services and establish AI regional zones with data center capacity and regulatory changes.

Demis Hassabis emphasized the need for international standards in AI environments, particularly regarding intellectual property handling.

Interestingly, the U.K. government has partnered with OpenAI and Anthropic, rivals to Google in the generative AI space, sparking potential for future collaboration.