Hertfordshire facility launches a three-year rollout aimed at delivering 1GW of sovereign, liquid-cooled computing capacity.
UK cloud provider Civo has announced the first of 40 planned edge datacenters, beginning a nationwide push to expand sovereign artificial intelligence infrastructure.
The Hertfordshire facility will launch with 8MW of capacity and is expected to grow to 38MW on the same site. Civo has confirmed it has secured five more locations in Lancashire, Greater Manchester, London and Oxfordshire, representing 150MW in total. The wider network is scheduled to be developed over a three-year period and reach 1GW.
The sites are designed for AI inference, placing computing power closer to organisations and devices that need rapid responses. Each facility will use direct-to-chip liquid cooling, while heat-recovery systems could supply nearby homes, factories and greenhouses.
“Britain has the talent. What it needs is infrastructure to match it,” said Civo chief executive Mark Boost. He said the distributed network would give UK organisations high-density infrastructure under domestic control and offer international customers a compliant UK base for services and data.
Civo also plans to be among the first UK cloud providers to offer NVIDIA’s Vera Rubin platform. Orders are open, with early-access pricing from $10 an hour, alongside existing B300, B200, H100 and H200 capacity.
The company said its in-house AI stack is designed to remain open and interoperable while supporting UK security and compliance requirements.
