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A multibillion-dollar transatlantic tech agreement announced to coincide with Donald Trump’s state visit represents “sloppy seconds from Silicon Valley”, Nick Clegg, Meta’s former president of global affairs, has said.
The former deputy prime minister said the deals, heralded with great fanfare by the government as it tries to foster growth in the UK, were “mutton dressed as lamb” and would make the country ever more reliant on US tech firms.
The announcements have included some of the biggest companies in the tech world, such as chipmaker Nvidia and the ChatGPT developer OpenAI. One announcement featured a Microsoft investment that was said to be worth $30bn (£22bn).
However, speaking at a Royal Television Society conference in Cambridge, Clegg said the relationship between the UK and the US tech sector was “all one-way traffic” and that the announcements suited the companies.
He warned Britain was being “defanged” by simply fostering a greater reliance on the US tech sector, rather than building its own.
“These companies need those infrastructure resources anyway,” he said. “They’re building datacentres all over the world. Maybe they were pushed a bit forward just to meet the timetable with this week’s state visit. But … it’s all one-way traffic.
“We’re a kind of vassal state technologically, we really are. The moment our companies, our tech companies, start developing any scale or ambition, they have to go to California, because we don’t have the growth capital here.”
He also revealed former US ambassador Peter Mandelson had asked for his advice on the tech sector before the Trump visit. Clegg said he advised the peer to be cautious about US-UK tech tie-ups.
“In a sense, this US-UK tech deal is just another version of the United Kingdom holding on to Uncle Sam’s coat-tails,” he said.
“We just have to be a little bit more realistic about our predicament and a little bit firmer about what we can do ourselves, rather than what I think we’re seeing with this US-UK tech deal – which is basically just taking sloppy seconds from Silicon Valley.”
His intervention will frustrate ministers, as attracting investment from big tech has formed a major part of their search for growth. The deals have been used as an example of Britain’s success in building a close US relationship.
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It came after Jensen Huang, the co-founder and chief executive of the US AI chipmaker Nvidia, predicted “the UK is going to be an AI superpower” as he announced a new £500m investment in a British firm.
Huang, who was due to join Donald Trump at Wednesday night’s state banquet with the king, said he was taking an equity stake in Nscale, a UK cloud computing company, and predicted it would earn revenues of up to £50bn over the next six years.
“We’re here to announce that the UK is going to be an AI superpower,” he told a press conference in London.
Huang cited as evidence of Britain’s potential its universities and several companies founded in the UK, ranging from the AI giant DeepMind to the driverless car startup Wayve.
“You just don’t appreciate it. Your universities. Come on. You’re too humble,” he said.
