It's a talent pool that many big employers want to tap into across a range of skills and industries. Cambridge is the best place to do bio-science and research. That is largely because the UK provides training and opportunities to its young people.
"I saw that 20 years go" is one data point that ignores the wider statistics. I'm not sure what else you can back your argument with.
UK is finished
Universities as they exist are not fit for the year 2026. THe year 1990? Yes, absolutely! The world has changed massively since then. It is less attractive to sacrifice years of earnings - which bring much greater experiences than what you get at uni + debt repayments of student loans to finance tuition fee's which have grown sharply from 3k/year to 9k/year and so on.
Wow, what a terrible, yet perhaps inadvertently accurate, metaphor.
If UK government wanted to properly invest in the AI, they would be developing chip fabs and embedding themselves in the supply chains.
It's a perfect time to build DDR5 factory, if GPUs are too large undertaking.
That's not how the economy works... Nothing gets "sucked out of the economy", and certainly not a productive investment that generated that income.
If a fund invests £100bn expecting 15-20% IRR, they're extracting multiples of that over the asset lifetime. That's the whole point - they're not philanthropists. The UK tax take is thin because these structures are explicitly designed for tax efficiency.
The deeper issue is where in the value chain the UK is positioning itself. Hosting someone else's compute is the low-margin end - it's being a warehouse. The high-margin positions are fabrication and supply chain. Taiwan, South Korea, and now the US via CHIPS Act understand this. They're not inviting hyperscalers to build data centres and calling it industrial strategy - they're building domestic fab capacity because that's where durable value and strategic leverage sit.
The UK is offering itself as a site rather than building itself as a participant. Those are very different things.
Compared to the fever dreams playing out in the US.
Partly it's because politicians think every dollar (pound) "invested" is the same, whether it goes on bricks and mortar or silicon or software.
UK has some of the highest priced electricity for industrial use on the planet. A result of deliberate policy choices. Who in their right mind would want to grow a vast datacentre estate there?
A large business is estimated to use 50MWh at £14,706 a year [2]. It'll cost in excess of £300k per year just to run electricity, not that the grid has that in spare capacity [3]. It's completely in contrast to their green energy campaign.
Then, they don't even have any kind of contract actually in place:
> Asked about the terms of the contract that Nscale had signed to build the supercomputer by the end of this year, the government did not reply directly. Instead, it said that Nscale’s entire $2.5bn investment was “not a formal contract, rather an intention to commit capital”, and “may well include equipment and capital funding”.
There's not enough serious capital invested to get this off of the ground (or even to break ground seemingly). And then there are basic questions, like:
1. Why would build a data center that is supposed to create tonnes of jobs, in a location where it costs a lot to employ people?
2. Why would you outsource your data center if you live in the US or EU, when there are better options available locally? These data centers sure as hell won't be used by British companies because the government are crushing them with tax.
3. The energy cost is far too high compared to locations with nuclear or hydro electricity generation.
This whole thing stinks. I think it's a complete and utter lie.
[1] https://uk.investing.com/news/stock-market-news/how-much-doe...
[2] https://www.moneysupermarket.com/gas-and-electricity/busines...
[3] https://watt-logic.com/2025/01/09/blackouts-near-miss-in-tig...
- coreweave used the initial investment to buy gpus and put them in existing datacenters, rather than building new datacenters from scratch
- nscale is very behind on their planned datacenter, and will miss the deadline
- coreweaves new datacenter in partnership with datavita is probably on track, but its not clear how datavita will get the 1GW of energy to run it
I lean towards AI skepticism, but these dont seem thay bad to me. My guess would be the first 2 are the promises of silicon valley velocity hurtling headfirst into european administrative process.
And the third seems like just the challenge the firm has taken on, which could be solved with huge solar plant or something. We wont know until they try. Which is ambitious but theres nothing wrong with that.
If there were credible red flags as to the demand for the supply these datacenters will generate, or the projected 47b boost to the economy if that supply were produced, then thered be real cause to doubt. Because the whole value chain might not be well thought out. And thays the part i personally am not entirely sure about.
But if thats fine then just being negative because the companies didnt meet their how ambitions is a bit cruel. And this sort of attitude will just suffocate any silicon valley style dynamism that europe might be hoping to cultivate
All made up bullshit numbers
But in the UK? What UK AI orgs are there? Deep Mind is/was but they're owned by Google since a long time ago. Is there even a single large UK company taking money for AI that isn't just flagrantly scamming by any measure?
When was that? Seems I missed it, the market cap of cryptocurrencies in general seems to still be around ~2.5T USD, way above what I thought an "implosion" would mean.
But yeah, we need a power-hungry datacenter more than we need proper sewerage, proper water management investment, shorter hospital wait times, decent border patrol, or some of the fucking potholes fixed!
Still, it makes a change to just giving the money to the NarcoFührer clown in Ukraine, I suppose.
I don't know about all the other accusations you make, but this one is pretty off the mark, considering this has been the most unpopular government amongst the rich in a while. I mean, it's Labour, what did you expect?
Anyway, troll, I'm sure the russians care about the UK pothole situation.
The real role they play is something very different to everything that comes before in education, and a bit closer to everything in the world that will ideally come after: immersion in your field of choice in an environment full of curious peers who are variously a few steps ahead of you, all the way up to world class experts in the field doing research.
Parts of your interactions there may include being actively taught relevant things, but the more important goal is to let you explore this environment and the material (yes, with a bit of structure) and in doing so figure out how to learn on your own.
You absolutely should be able to get a degree with top marks without attending a single lecture, seminar, lab, whatever, just by reading the material and interacting with those around you less formally, and never being actively 'taught' anything.
Many in fact do something approaching this, particularly in the later years of a degree.
"You absolutely should be able to get a degree with top marks without attending a single lecture, seminar, lab, whatever, just by reading the material and interacting with those around you less formally, and never being actively 'taught' anything."
So people should pay 9k a year to get a glorified piece of paper, when they essentially have taught themselves?
The piece of paper is just the evidence that you've been through a journey successfully. What you're really paying for is access to the environment that facilitates that journey.
The journey is essentially transitioning from a system which is pricipally about executing diligently on well-defined instructions, to one which is about reaching more broadly defined and often even self-selected goals by whatever means you choose.
Obviously aspects overlap, the changes come in steadily over the years of a degree, and even in the most ideal case it's still basically just practice, but the journey is supposed to develop the higher order skills that at that age you are ready to develop, and must develop to succeed 'in the wild' so to speak.
Absolutely 100% one of those higher order skills, indeed maybe the most important, is being able to self-teach whatever necessary to fill in gaps in order to do something interesting, that won't be provided for you or made easy for you in any way. You have to figure it out on your own. Just as you will have to in more or less every single challenge you encounter in the world after university.
So again, the environment in which you develop those skills (along with so many other benefits) is what you're paying for and the piece of paper, such that it is, is just the evidence you succeeded in that.
But, I like to reference https://marktarver.com/professor.html on the state of education in the UK.
I'm guessing you're talking about smaller projects? AFAIK, neither Bitcoin nor Ethereum have anything to do with AI, and combined they're 1.5T USD in market cap, that's not propped up by AI, is it?
THe majority of university courses don't require one to be in the environment - e.g. medicine does in contrast.
Employers frankly don't care about that - what they care about is 'are you going to be productive?'. Therefore what Universities have failed to understand is that students don't even care about the experience anymore - they want confidence that by the time they are 21 they will be employable.
Essentially what I'm pointing at - that you are missing - is that the University system is one-dimensional whilst not addressing the issues re. the bridge to the labour market and what employers demand. Something else, something much better is necessary that re-organises and disrupts the existing university model. I actually have a solution in mind, however, it's going to cause so many prof's who just collect a pay-cheque to lose their job that it'll cause a riot so I don't see people willing to push it through.
FYI I have spoken to many CEO's across a myriad of firms of varying complexities and sizes - they all fall on the same conclusions as I've stated. They simply do not care and want people who will be productive, particularly in-line with specifics of what the job entails, from day one. There is very little patience and resource allocated towards training anymore than years-past.
That's separate from the question of being taught, self teaching, and the combo of the two, I think. That's more to do with just the material itself and the goals you're set.
I do think though, all else being equal, in a business you're going to want to prefer people who have demonstrated the kind of higher order skill and agency to be able to adapt and self teach.
I get that in a lot of businesses the difference might not be material, stuff turnover is high, focus is practical and short term and not about how this or that graduate will develop within the business over a long period of time and so on.
But still, of two people with the requisite hard skills to get going quickly you're probably always going to favour the one who seems better able to also adapt to changes and learn new skills in a totally self directed way, right?
Particularly in today's environment - I can hardly imagine a point in history where this has broadly been more important.