RUSI | The Rt Hon Liz Kendall MP delivers at speech at RUSI on Tech Sovereignty in the UK and the World, April 2026
Last week, Secretary of State Liz Kendall set out the case for building UK capability in artificial intelligence (AI) in an era of geopolitical disruption—reducing dependence and treating the technology as a strategic priority.
Much of what was announced was not new. A £500 million sovereign AI initiative. Supercomputer access for British AI companies. Super-priority visa decisions for R&D talent. A £100 million ARIA scaling investment. Yet it provides a clear signal of the momentum behind the UK’s AI ambition.
Kendall set out two developments as critical to developing British AI capabilities:
And two new approaches to developing complementary strengths with allied partners:
These approaches acknowledge the key complexity at the core of delivering on national AI ambition: the need to develop new forms of cooperation, across government departments, across sectors, and across countries.
Building AI infrastructure at strategic scale is, fundamentally, a coordination challenge and requires consistent decisions across planning, energy, compute supply chains, and international partnerships—systems often managed in isolation, by different parts of government, on different timescales.
At StateUp, our work to equip government and industry to shape critical technologies and national capacity around them, as the backbone to resilient economies and societies, is ramping up. We consistently see three forms of coordination that are urgently needed:
AI-based defense platforms require vast, resilient compute power that depends on low-carbon energy infrastructure—national AI capability cannot be built in isolation from energy security and defense innovation. Achieving this requires industry and government coordination, procurement strategies, and strong innovation ecosystems that bring together tech companies, industry, and government priorities.
Organisational silos severely limit cities' AI and digital capability—33% of resilience teams have no visibility into digital projects, and most digital teams lack mandates to address social equity or economic challenges. Successfully leveraging AI for urban resilience requires breaking barriers between technical capacity, policy mandates, and cross-departmental coordination, as evidence-based policymaking, behavioral change, and digital adoption are mutually reinforcing.
Countries can build AI capability through coordinated bilateral cooperation, pooling research capacity across institutions. This is increasingly critical as the fields of AI, High-Performance Computing (HPC), and Quantum Technologies converge into hybrid systems. HPC provides the backbone, quantum accelerates specific optimisation and simulation tasks, and AI orchestrates models and workflows—making cross-stack collaboration more valuable than siloed initiatives. As StateUp has been exploring with partners, there is an opportunity to create joint frameworks for innovation that neither nation could achieve alone.
The window for ensuring that UK AI capability is sufficiently robust, scaled, and creative to support national resilience needs may be narrow. Countries that fail to coordinate across energy, defense, and international partnerships could risk ongoing strategic dependence—or a lack of access to key components in the AI supply chain.
Kendall's speech recognises that national AI ambition cannot succeed through departmental initiatives alone; it requires enabling synchronised decision-making and cross-sector alignment. It is now time to build the coordination infrastructure to equip government and industry to work at speed and scale.
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