Assembly Research says there is an £18 billion opportunity for sovereign AI in the country
BT Business says it offers the UK’s first full suite of sovereign services, with an end-to-end portfolio spanning sovereign connectivity, voice, cloud and AI, for the public and private sector. The intention is to that the platform will help customers keep sensitive workloads in the UK, strengthen their operational control and allow them to deploy digital services faster – without compromising security, resilience or compliance.
As part of the expanded sovereign portfolio, BT is building sovereign AI capability with Nscale and NVIDIA to deliver new sovereign AI solutions in the UK. This will enable organisations to run AI workloads domestically, scale capacity on demand and meet data residency, security and regulatory requirements – supporting use cases from operational automation to advanced analytics and AI-assisted customer service.
BT is also launching Sovereign Cloud – a private cloud platform hosted and operated entirely within the UK. Designed for organisations handling sensitive or regulated workloads, it provides compute, storage and backup capabilities underpinned by Rackspace Technology’s UK data centre infrastructure, with UK-based, security-cleared teams and managed services to support migration, operations and ongoing compliance.
A new report from Assembly Research finds that concerns over data security are holding back AI adoption in the UK. BT claims that digital sovereignty could provide the confidence for organisations to scale AI securely – unlocking an estimated £18 billion productivity boost for the economy, although it doesn’t go into great detail (see graphic below).
The report also highlights the wider commercial opportunity created by sovereign infrastructure. For example, faster investment in UK-based data centres could generate £14.6 billion by 2030, while the expansion of sovereign cloud services is estimated to be worth an additional £13.6 billion over the next five years.
Source: The UK’s Digital Sovereignty Opportunity report for BT Group by Assembly Research, published April 2026
Greater use of domestically controlled systems can also simplify compliance. The research suggests it could make it easier for organisations to meet UK data protection rules and sector-specific regulation, helping to avoid fines up to £1 billion for failure to comply with GDPR.
