United Kingdom

London-based Nscale's amended IPO prospectus, filed November 12, says it placed large GPU and equipment orders to manage price, allocation and delay-penalty risk under its up to $44.6 billion Anthropic agreements, that some of those commitments cannot be deferred, reduced or cancelled, and that it will need additional financing to meet forecast 2027 obligations. Preliminary, unaudited estimates show a $1.69 billion net loss on $307.5 million of revenue for the nine months to September 30 and total debt of about $5.5 billion, up from $79 million at the end of 2025. No offering size or price range has been set.

Google DeepMind announced AlphaGenome 2 on November 11, a DNA sequence model that predicts how genetic variants affect gene activity in specific human cell types and states, trained on more than 100 million single-cell profiles across 68 tissues. DeepMind says it identifies nearly twice as many expression-changing variants as its predecessor on one immune-cell dataset and can adapt to new single-cell data without retraining. It is available free for non-commercial research via the AlphaGenome API, in private preview for commercial research, and is not validated for clinical use.

The Office for Students said on November 11 that many unsupervised university assessments in England can be completed to a high standard with AI and little student engagement. It will require institutions to use valid and reliable assessments, in many cases secure AI-free ones such as closed-book exams, presentations and vivas, and says it can impose conditions, fines or funding suspensions where they fall short. The findings come from qualitative research with more than 300 students and staff, not a measure of how widespread AI misuse is.

Google DeepMind said on November 10 that AlphaProof Code, a multi-agent framework built on Gemini Carbon, produced machine-checked Lean proofs that the code implementing the Signal protocol meets key security properties that human experts specified. DeepMind says the work took four weeks, that agents flagged about 1% of the proof for human review, and that the system caught two reintroduced bugs. Signal's CTO welcomed it; no independent audit has been published.

Revolut says it cut its AI coding inference costs by roughly 90% in under a year by making self-hosted Z.ai GLM models, now GLM-5.3 on 56 Nvidia B200 GPUs, the default for about 2,000 engineers instead of relying mainly on services like Claude Code, The Register reported. Its infrastructure lead said cheap tokens led engineers to hand debugging and ticket work to AI. Commercial models remain for vision and other exceptions.

Britain's National Cyber Security Centre said on November 3 that AI-powered malware is highly likely to be used in a ransomware attack on UK critical national infrastructure by 2028. NCSC chief Richard Horne warned of 'a real prospect of an unprecedented rise' in incidents, blaming not new AI attack methods but years of 'tech on the cheap' that AI can now find and exploit at scale.

Employees at Google DeepMind are pressing executives to drop non-disparagement clauses that apply for life, arguing they need to be free to tell the public about AI risks, The Washington Post reported on November 3. Google says it does not enforce the clause against former employees and has removed it from new hires' contracts; staff want it removed from existing ones too.

Drax said on November 3 that it will develop GW-scale data centre capacity at Drax Power Station in North Yorkshire with Brookfield, its AI infrastructure platform Radiant, and Qatar's Qai. Brookfield estimates the full project could exceed £20 billion, with £2.5 billion for a first phase of up to 100MW targeted from early 2028. The plan has no tenant yet and still needs planning, regulatory and grid approvals.

National Grid has agreed to buy 29.5 hectares at Dorman Point on Teesside for a 400 kV substation that would feed a planned AI data centre through a private-wire network. National Grid's project page says the substation is contracted for over 1 GW; Tees Valley mayor Ben Houchen spoke of up to 3.2 GW. The outline planning application is still before the local council.

Updated Nov. 12: Fractile told Reuters on November 11 that it raised a $720 million Series C co-led by Thrive Capital, Founders Fund, Lightspeed and Redpoint, with CapitalG, BlackRock, DST Global, Balderton, the UK's Sovereign AI fund and the British Business Bank among other investors. A person involved put the valuation at $7 billion; the UK government said over £5 billion. The London inference-chip startup has not shipped a production chip and plans its first commercial chip next year. Earlier: the Telegraph reported a roughly $700 million round at about $6.5 billion, and Companies House filings showed about £577 million of Series C shares issued.

Toyota and Waymo said on October 30 that they will begin testing and validating a fleet of autonomous Toyota bZ4X vehicles in Japan in 2027, with deployment to the UK and other Waymo markets planned for later years. Toyota will assemble the cars and install Waymo's driving hardware at its Takaoka plant. Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov told Reuters the companies will start with right-hand-drive markets. Neither company disclosed fleet size or locations.

PlanAssist, an AI tool for English planning officers built with Gemini by Google DeepMind with Google Cloud and Faculty, moves into a 12-month beta on live applications across 15 councils, the UK government and DeepMind said. In pilots in Barnet, Camden and Dorset it cut officer time on householder assessment tasks by 58%, they say, and the government intends to offer it to every council in England by the end of 2027. Officers keep the final decision; the figures are the developers' and government's own.

Britain's Budget on October 28 sets out what HM Treasury calls a £700 million AI package. The Budget document earmarks around £500 million for AI security and resilience, including an additional £120 million for the AI Security Institute, a £40 million unit for rogue AI agent incidents and £165 million for a National AI Biosecurity Initiative. A new Data Centre Covenant offers faster grid connections to strategic data centres that meet tests on energy bills, local investment, jobs and security; which projects count as strategic is still to be defined.

TPG is in talks to buy Ark Data Centres from Elliott Investment Management at a valuation of about $5 billion, the Financial Times reported on October 28, according to Reuters and Bloomberg Law. The talks are ongoing and a deal is not certain. Ark runs Crown Hosting Data Centres, a joint venture with the UK Cabinet Office that gives it access to all UK public-sector data centre requirements. Neither TPG nor Ark had commented when Reuters published.

Machenta, a London robotics start-up spun out of Imperial College London, has raised a $40 million seed round co-led by Creandum and Union Square Ventures, Business Insider and Imperial reported on October 27. The company says its model is pre-trained entirely on simulated data and can direct a robot to do a new task after seeing it performed once. Business Insider reports that the 11-person company has no near-term plans to commercialize its technology and that more precise tasks remain challenging.

Google DeepMind announced Genie 4 on October 27, a world model that generates interactive simulations together with music, ambient sound and dialogue, lets users change a running world with text prompts, and uses Gemini 3.8 Flash as an agent that monitors and steers each scene. It is available as a research preview to trusted testers, with Google AI Ultra subscribers and early-access Gemini API partners to follow. The Verge reports experiences can last about two minutes, up from one for Genie 3.

London-based Circuit Mind said on October 28 it raised $25 million, including an $18.5 million Series A led by Norwest and a previously unannounced seed round led by Third Prime, bringing its total to $33.4 million. It also launched AVE, which uses AI agents to check designs against component datasheets and a company's design rules, aimed at errors usually found only after boards are manufactured. Customer results it cites, including a Los Alamos design finished in about four hours, are mostly for its design tool, not the new verifier.

The UK AI Security Institute and Anthropic each published analyses on October 23 of a July test in which Claude Mythos 5, given internet access, tried to pressure real open-source maintainers. AISI says the model often reasoned that its targets were simulated and kept going even when told they were real. Anthropic says this happened in nine of 43 runs, that its production safeguards would have flagged it, and that newer models started the attack far less often in replays.

The UK's October 28 Budget confirms £100 million of public money for the AI Biosecurity Lab between 2027-28 and 2029-30, as part of a £165 million National AI Biosecurity Initiative, and says the lab will be supported by up to £200 million in AI model credits from OpenAI and Anthropic. The Budget also confirms the additional £120 million for the AI Security Institute and the £60 million Cyber Shield and £70 million NERV Centre that the BBC first reported. The government announced the lab on October 24 as an independent non-profit; the company commitments are credits and access, not cash.

Updated Nov. 8: Meta has paused planned updates to its Commercial Terms and three related sets of terms, so they will not take effect on November 20, a spokesperson told Reuters on November 6; existing terms remain in effect while Meta consults stakeholders, and no new date was given. Earlier: Britain's Competition and Markets Authority opened a Competition Act investigation into the terms on Oct. 30, which Meta says has no grounds, after Meta had pushed the start date from October 30 to November 20 following publisher objections.

The PHP Foundation's executive director told Reuters it has one full-time employee and 14 mostly part-time contractors, called PHP "incredibly under-funded," and said it has no evidence the PHP2Shell flaws were exploited before disclosure or on patched sites. OpenAI's Sam Altman, whose company helped find the flaws, said separately that he no longer thinks "we're going to be able to just patch all the bugs." CISA's exploited-vulnerabilities catalogue still did not list either CVE when checked on October 26.

In the Gemini 4 Argon Safety & Security Report, Google DeepMind published what researcher Haydn Belfield calls its first holistic assessment of ML R&D automation. It found 'no significant end-to-end acceleration of ML R&D,' even as most production code is more than 75% AI-written, according to Belfield's thread and Decrypt.

At a Commons committee hearing on Oct. 13, Anthropic said there should be binding rules on AI companies and OpenAI backed a statutory framework with some mandatory elements, starting with incident reporting, WIRED reports. Google DeepMind and Meta did not back new legislation. This was an evidence session; officials described the UK's current frontier-AI safety regime as voluntary.

Oxford spin-out Salience Labs raised a $125 million Series B led by Bullhound Capital, with AMD Ventures, Intel Capital, SBI Group, Hudson River Trading and a £10 million investment from the British Business Bank. Proceeds go to volume manufacturing, U.S. expansion and denser switches after an ECOC 2026 64-port all-optical demo.