Two men sit side by side, both dressed for the part.
One wears the tightly disciplined uniform of political leadership. The other, the black-on-black armor of Silicon Valley cool.
Keir Starmer, the newly elected Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, look comfortable as they kicked off London Tech Week. Not in the friends-grabbing-a-pint-at-the-pub kind of way, but in the way heads of state and technologists learn to be when the world is watching and the stakes are definitely real.
Jensen is talking about AI the way Edison must’ve talked about light. Not as an invention but as an inevitability. And sitting next to him, nodding and occasionally jumping in with a well-practiced blend of humility and vision, is Starmer, whose government has just staked the better part of its early political capital on that very premise.
AI isn’t coming, they are saying together. It’s here. And Britain, post-Brexit, post-chaos, post-decade of dithering, is finally ready to lead again.
But it didn’t begin on this stage. Not really. So let’s rewind.
Before moving stage left to comfy chairs and a professional moderator with the CEO of NVIDIA, Starmer stood alone in front of a packed room for his first major address on technology since taking office.
It was the kind of moment tech week organizers dream of. A Prime Minister showing up not just to cut ribbons or smile in front of renderings of hypothetical datacenters, but to actually stake out a policy vision grounded in compute, infrastructure, skills, and perhaps above all, partnership.
And he meant it. Or at least, he sounded like he did.
“This is a shared mission,” he told the room. “AI is not something to fear, t’s something we shape together. And we do that through partnership.”
Starmer didn’t pretend to be a deep technologist. What he offered instead was a kind of moral architecture for what a country like the UK could become if it stopped reacting to the world and started shaping it again.
Britain, he said, should be an AI maker, not an AI taker.
So the government will spend an extra £1 billion to scale the UK’s national compute capabilities by 20X. He also says they will invest £185 million to bring AI into every layer of the education system. Starmer added they will retrain 7.5 million people in AI-relevant skills by the end of the decade, backed by partnerships with 11 major tech companies (including NVIDIA). And interestingly, he said they’ll seek to unclog key bottlenecks from regulatory hurdles to broader culture that have kept the country’s talent and ideas locked behind bureaucracy and fear.
NVIDIA also committed to expanding its UK operations, including an expanded lab in Bristol and a new AI talent pipeline program.
“This,” Starmer said, “is the step-change.”
But the step-change was already visible. Because the stage wasn’t just about the PM. It was also about who chose to sit next to him.
It’s easy to underestimate the theater of these things. After all, a prime minister and a CEO smiling at each other on a panel seems, on the surface, like standard economic diplomacy. But if you’ve been around long enough you know that Jensen Huang doesn’t lend his presence lightly.
Huang framed AI as the great equalizer, a technology so important it redefines who can participate in the digital economy. “For the last 50 years,” he said, “computer science was for the few who could code. Now, with AI, everyone who speaks human can program a machine.”
It was a subtle challenge to the idea of AI as elite, or inaccessible, or dangerous. And in doing so, he reinforced Starmer’s core pitch to the country: That AI, properly integrated, doesn’t chip away at human agency, it can restore it.
And while this might feel a bit like an afterthought, after watching the entire conversation, this observer kept getting stuck on Starmer’s aside about Somers Town, a working-class neighborhood in his constituency, just a stone’s throw from the AI-soaked entrepreneurial playground of King’s Cross.
Starmer talked about the children there who, despite living near the epicenter of British tech, could not see themselves in it. Could not imagine their way into that world. He pointed to a real thing: Google DeepMind, answering his challenge, had opened an AI campus in Somers Town, within eyesight of the local school.
“You can’t aspire to do something unless you can see it,” he said.
This is where the speech took its sharpest turn, from economic strategy to national narrative. Starmer doesn’t want AI policy to be measured only in patents or productivity stats. He wants it felt. In hospitals. In schools. In immigration backlogs. In social care offices, where overburdened case workers, he said, are already using AI to reduce paperwork and reclaim time for human connection.
And in classrooms. Especially in classrooms.
Because, as he explains, this isn’t just about the next generation of workers. It’s about a generation of children who see AI not as a thing that happens to them, but as something they can build, control, and improve.
Which brings us to the final takeaway from the speech and interview that followed and the billion-pound announcements. It’s that new British AI project isn’t purely economic, it’s rooted in ethics and education.
Another thing to mention along these lines is that Starmer kept returning to the idea that security, not novelty, is what people want from technology. Not in the military sense, though he made a case there too, citing how AI is already transforming battlefield tactics in Ukraine. But in the daily sense, namely job security, healthcare that works, classrooms that adapt to different students, housing that gets built wen it's promised.
“This,” he said, “is about giving working people a base camp, a foundation they can build a life on.”
Housing. Healthcare. Public services. Planning reform. These aren’t the usual headliners in a speech about AI. But that’s precisely why they matter.
Starmer wants the country to believe that AI is not something exotic or external. It is something built in, something that belongs to them. And the UK, he said, is once again a stable partner for investment, and defiantly open for business.
The audience, many of them still reeling from years of post-Brexit whiplash, murmured their approval. But the real proof was not in the phrase, but in what preceded it: a £1.5 billion vote of confidence from Liquidity Group, who will base their European HQ in London.
For the global tech elite watching, this was the subplot that mattered. Britain, for years seen as a driftwood economy battered by political instability, now had a Prime Minister making coherent, cross-sectoral moves…and fast.
Whether the plan works remains to be seen. The markets will have their say. So will the children of Somers Town.