Artificial intelligence pioneer Ken Mulvany has warned that Britain will be left in the dust of the global technology boom unless Whitehall urgently reforms power grid infrastructure, planning regulations, healthcare procurement and capital taxes.
The warning follows chipmaker Nvidia reporting quarterly revenue of nearly £71 billion, marking a 106 per cent increase on a year earlier as global demand for artificial intelligence infrastructure continues to surge.
Mulvany, the executive director and chair of BenevolentAI, said the financial results demonstrate a world seeking far more intelligence than existing infrastructure can supply, paying whatever it takes to secure it. Having spent 14 years building artificial intelligence systems and even longer as an investor, he noted that the cost of machine intelligence has collapsed, allowing capabilities that once consumed entire research budgets to be bought for pennies.
Drawing historical parallels, Mulvany pointed to Victorian railway mania, which made fortunes and ruined investors while leaving behind physical tracks on which British trade expanded. Similarly, the dotcom crash destroyed hundreds of billions of dollars before leaving the fibre optic networks that support the modern internet. Cloud computing and smartphones followed the same pattern, with their greatest economic effects felt far beyond hardware suppliers in businesses that could not exist when every firm required its own servers.
According to Mulvany, artificial intelligence will follow the same trajectory at a much faster speed. Nvidia currently ships a new generation of AI supercomputers every year, with each iteration delivering significantly more computing power for the same electricity and capital. Consequently, machines installed at enormous expense today will become second-rate within a handful of years, creating a formidable investment problem for buyers but providing a major benefit to the rest of the economy.
Mulvany described cheap machine intelligence as the most productive input offered to any economy since cheap energy. He argued that applying these tools across the economy could deliver the productivity growth Britain has sought since the 2008 financial crisis, raising wages and funding public services.
In practical terms, cheap intelligence allows a general practitioner to draw instantly on more medical knowledge than any individual could retain. A scientist can test a hypothesis in an afternoon that once took months, while a small British manufacturer can access the analytical capabilities of a multinational corporation. A five-person firm can also operate with the commercial reach of fifty people.
Infrastructure and Power Grid Obstacles
However, Mulvany emphasized that economic benefits will not arrive simply because Nvidia sells more chips, but rather when businesses reorganise around what those chips make possible. He warned that Whitehall is currently getting key policy choices wrong, starting with industrial power supplies.
Data centres function primarily as machines for turning electricity into intelligence, yet Britain has some of the most expensive industrial electricity in the developed world alongside a power grid never designed for current demand. A company capable of financing and building a data centre in two years cannot sensibly be told that its grid connection will take a decade to arrive. Mulvany warned that designating data centres as critical national infrastructure achieves nothing if facilities cannot be plugged into the network.
Energy regulator Ofgem has started clearing speculative data centre projects from the grid connections queue. Mulvany urged ministers to go further by favouring credible projects that locate where power capacity exists, flex their energy demand, and support the grid, establishing a principle that projects driving growth and using power efficiently get connected faster.
Planning Delays and Ofgem Reforms
Planning regulations present another major obstacle, according to Mulvany. Because the machinery inside a data centre becomes obsolete within three years, a planning evaluation process that takes three years acts as a veto rather than a delay. While designated growth zones assist at the margin, he called for a national presumption in favour of development accompanied by legally binding statutory deadlines.
Healthcare Procurement and NHS Data
Mulvany identified healthcare as an obvious British advantage, given the scale of the NHS, its vast quantities of medical data, and a single system capable of national deployment. In practice, however, the health service is the largest buyer of medical intelligence on earth while remaining among the slowest to procure it.
With individual hospital trusts running separate pilot projects, individual data agreements, and 18-month evaluations, Mulvany described the current setup as a guarantee that gains arrive last where they are needed first. He advocated for a single national procurement framework, unified data rules, and an explicit mandate to deploy working technologies nationally.
Pension Capital and Share Trading Taxes
Regarding financial capital, Mulvany warned that next-generation AI companies require substantial funding to scale despite employing relatively few people. He cautioned that Britain must stop producing world-class science and ambitious founders only to see their businesses relocate to Boston or San Francisco during their first major funding rounds.
British pension funds hold a smaller share of domestic equities than those in almost any comparable country, and Mulvany stated that voluntary accords have had their chance. He urged reforms to investment tax treatment to ensure British savers benefit from domestic growth, alongside reducing Britain's 0.5 per cent tax on purchases of UK shares, which disadvantages domestic equities compared to overseas stocks. Although pension reforms are beginning to direct funds back toward British growth assets, the critical test remains whether the country can generate enough domestic capital to scale its top companies locally.
National Strengths and Global Competition
Mulvany stressed that succeeding in the AI era does not require Britain to compete with America in chip manufacturing or replicate Silicon Valley in the Thames Valley. Britain already possesses key assets that become more valuable as intelligence grows cheaper, including world-class science, deep capital markets, leading universities, pharmaceutical expertise, and large industries with complex problems to solve.
Unlocking these advantages requires no government subsidies, but rather the state stepping aside to allow a willing market to meet a willing customer. Pointing out that the primary hardware engines are built in Santa Clara and Taiwan, Mulvany concluded that prosperous nations will treat AI as an economic opportunity rather than a technology story, adding that Nvidia has fired the starting gun and asking whether Britain intends to run.
