Artificial intelligence will define the economic and security landscape of the coming decades. But AI does not exist in the abstract. It depends on physical systems - chips, advanced materials, and the skills and infrastructure that bring them together. To lead in AI, and deliver on the ambition set out in the AI Opportunities Action Plan, we must also lead in the hardware that underpins it. This means strengthening the UK’s capability in the technologies that matter most, while working with trusted partners to ensure resilience, access and long-term economic security.
The UK enters this moment with real strengths: world-leading research, globally competitive design capabilities, and a vibrant ecosystem of innovative companies. But we also face increasing concentration of supply, intensifying geopolitical competition, and growing vulnerability in the critical technologies that power modern economies.
This plan sets out how we will respond.
It marks an evolution in how government supports the UK semiconductor sector to harness its strengths in AI hardware - moving from a set of individually strong but fragmented activities to a more coherent, system-level strategy. One that better connects early-stage innovation to deployment, procurement to investment, and skills to long-term capability.
At its core, this is about three things.
First, it is about backing British companies - ensuring that our most promising innovators can develop, demonstrate, and scale their technologies here in the UK to compete globally. Too often, breakthrough ideas generated in the UK are commercialised elsewhere. This plan is about changing that trajectory.
Second, it is about building sovereign capability in the technologies that matter most for AI - from the design of advanced chips to emerging semiconductor paradigms such as photonics and edge AI inference. We will not seek to replicate every part of global supply chains. But we will ensure that the UK has strength, resilience, and strategic leverage in the areas most critical to our future, through an open and globally integrated approach grounded in trusted partnerships. This includes continuing to work with established global providers to access cutting-edge technologies, while backing British companies to develop and compete globally.
Third, it is about translating capability into real-world impact - accelerating adoption across the economy, supporting new industries, and ensuring that the benefits of AI are widely felt. That means linking innovation more directly to deployment, including through public procurement, industrial partnerships, and targeted investment.
We are taking a phased approach: to develop and demonstrate the technologies of the future; deploy them into real-world settings; and scale the companies and capabilities that will anchor long-term growth.
This Plan is a long-term commitment to securing the foundations of our AI economy. Ensuring that the UK is not only a participant in global supply chains, but a country with enduring capability, resilience and influence within them. The UK has a clear choice: to remain dependent on technologies developed and controlled elsewhere, or to act with ambition – building the capabilities, international partnerships and leadership needed to compete fiercely and secure its place in the future of AI hardware. This plan is about choosing the latter.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/uk-ai-hardware-plan/uk-ai-hardware-plan