Google Expands AI in the UK with New Data Residency and Startup Support
Google is stepping up its UK AI initiatives with a batch of announcements looking to extend its reach and cultivate partnerships with UK businesses, as per TechCrunch. CEO of Google DeepMind Demis Hassabis and Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian were joined on Monday by delegates from BT and WPP in London to release new plans for the country. These initiatives revolve around greater data residency and financial incentives to encourage AI startups.
UK Data Residency and Agentspace Expansion
Google revealed it would expand its UK data residency offerings by incorporating Agentspace, its platform for building enterprise AI agents. This implies that organizations can now have their AI-based tools hosted locally in the UK, a step designed to tackle data security and privacy issues.
Agentspace, which went into beta in December 2024, is intended to assist companies in developing AI agents that automate workflows and enhance customer engagement. Features such as NotebookLM, a service that can process and summarize vast amounts of data, are central to the platform’s capabilities.
With these announcements, Agentspace will now be available within the UK data residency region, building on Google’s earlier commitment to allow public and private organizations to store data, train AI models, and run inference on their Gemini 1.5 Flash model within the country.
Supporting AI Startups with Financial Incentives
Google also offers startups financial incentives to nurture the UK’s AI ecosystem. Companies joining Google’s new UK accelerator program will receive up to £280,000 in Google Cloud credits and expanded AI skills training. This initiative is part of Google’s broader strategy to encourage innovation and help businesses adopt AI at scale.
IDC analyst Mick Heys said, “We know from our research that a significant percentage of organizations across Europe are still very nervous about using AI in the public cloud.”
He added, “They want to deploy AI, and they’re happy to do experimenting in the cloud, but when it comes to actual deployment at scale, they want to do that in dedicated infrastructure or some kind of co-location environment, something that is really managed much more closely by them. That’s partly because they’re just nervous about data security, privacy and sovereignty issues. So those things are still very live.”
Also read: India's Apollo Hospitals to Expand Use of AI to Ease Workload for Medical Staff
Chirp 3 Integration with Vertex AI
Google also made headlines at the event, announcing that Chirp 3, its advanced audio generation model developed by DeepMind, will now be integrated into the Vertex AI developer platform. This move will give developers more tools to create cutting-edge AI applications that leverage audio capabilities.
