UK cloud provider Civo plans 40 edge data centres across Britain, targeting 1 GW of AI capacity over the longer term, The Register reported on 22 September. The planned network would use Nvidia Vera Rubin systems to serve customers from UK-owned facilities.
Key points
- Civo expects its first site, in Hertfordshire, to open by March 2027 with 8 MW of capacity.
- The company says it has secured five further sites and expects capacity to reach 150 MW within three years.
- Civo is taking orders for Vera Rubin access, with early pricing starting at $10 per hour.
Hertfordshire starts at 8 MW
Fit-out work is under way at the Hertfordshire facility, Konsulteer reported on 23 September. Civo expects the site to expand from its initial 8 MW to 38 MW. It is the opening stage of a plan to distribute computing capacity across the country rather than place the entire network at one location.
Civo says it has secured another five locations in Lancashire, Greater Manchester, London and Oxfordshire. It expects those sites to bring its capacity to 150 MW within three years. The 1 GW target is a longer-term ambition for the full network, rather than capacity Civo says is already operating.
The company is designing all 40 planned sites for direct-to-chip liquid cooling. It also plans systems that could recover waste heat for local district heating networks serving homes, factories and greenhouses. According to Konsulteer, Civo’s design team models how each facility would operate at full load before construction.
Vera Rubin access starts at $10 an hour
Civo intends to equip the facilities with Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 systems. The configuration brings 72 Rubin GPUs and 36 Vera CPUs together in one rack, with 288 GB of HBM4 memory for each GPU. The equipment choice places power and cooling demands at the centre of the site designs.
Civo is already taking orders for Vera Rubin access at an early price starting at $10 per hour. The company expects to be among the first UK cloud providers to offer the platform once the Hertfordshire facility opens. Civo also says Vera Rubin can deliver up to five times the inference performance of Nvidia’s Blackwell platform.
The proposed network is aimed at inference: running trained AI models in applications used near the point of a request. Civo argues that agents, robots and vehicles will create demand for computing closer to users, following a period in which model training favoured large, centralised clusters.
Nvidia estimates that inference accounts for about 35 percent of AI workloads and could reach 60 to 65 percent by 2030. Civo’s plan pairs that expected change in workloads with facilities spread across Britain, rather than relying on a single large campus to serve every application.
Civo pitches UK ownership against US cloud providers
Civo is also selling domestic ownership to customers concerned about dependence on US-controlled cloud providers. At least 80 percent of UK businesses that use cloud services depend on AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud, according to a report covered by The Register. Those providers are the established alternatives against which Civo is positioning its proposed network.
The US CLOUD Act adds to concerns about reliance on US-controlled cloud providers, The Register reported. The law permits American authorities to seek data from US companies even when it is held overseas. In June, a US export-control directive prompted Anthropic to suspend access to two advanced models; the controls were lifted later that month.
Chief executive Mark Boost said 73 percent of 1,000 UK IT leaders surveyed by Civo regarded AI sovereignty as a strategic priority, compared with 61 percent in the previous year. Boost gave the figures at the company’s Civo Navigate event in London, The Register reported.
Civo is offering the planned Vera Rubin capacity alongside Nvidia B300, B200, H100 and H200 instances that customers can already order.
