Sovereign compute is rented: no legal guarantee of access to US-controlled infrastructure on UK soil

Public compute through AIRR runs to about 21 exaFLOPs and is dwarfed by the hyperscaler build-out under the September 2025 Tech Prosperity Deal: roughly £31bn, with £22bn from Microsoft and Stargate UK delivered through Nscale, OpenAI and NVIDIA in the North East AI Growth Zone. The assets sit on UK soil under US corporate control and US export-control and executive-order jurisdiction. The CMA's cloud market investigation found AWS and Microsoft each hold 30 to 40 per cent of UK cloud and recommended Strategic Market Status designation, and the CMA Board declined to prioritise the investigations. No contract or statute guarantees UK access in a rationing scenario like Europe-2031's tiered access, where UK tier-one status is discretionary.

The UK's AI strategy assumes continuous access to US models and compute. That access is a policy choice made in Washington and revocable without notice. Physical location confers no sovereignty unless law anchors it.

Legal anchoring written into AI Growth Zone planning and power deals: statutory step-in and priority-access rights for designated critical workloads, escrow for the weights and data serving UK public services, and a government compute reserve for continuity. Reviving the shelved Strategic Market Status designations of AWS and Microsoft belongs in the same package.

// State-led: Instrument: statutory step-in/priority-access rights, escrow mandates and revived SMS designations.

£31bn of US-controlled compute is being contracted onto UK soil now, and step-in rights cannot be retrofitted once the deals close.