Britain showered Trump with all the pomp it could muster. What did it get in return? | CNN
Britain showered Trump with all the pomp it could muster. What did it get in return? | CNN
Britain showered Trump with all the pomp it could muster. What did it get in return? | CNN
In his state banquet speech, Donald Trump said the bond between the United States and Britain was “unbreakable.” In truth, the British government has feared all week that one misstep during the US pre...
Starmer’s biggest coup is the £150 billion ($203 billion) worth of investment from US companies, dubbed the “Tech Prosperity Deal.” Some £31 billion will come from US tech giants to beef up Britain’s AI and tech infrastructure, while the bulk of that investment – £90 billion – will come from Blackstone, a private capital firm, over the next decade.
The government – desperate for good economic news before the November Budget – claims that investment will create some 7,600 jobs.
But not everyone is convinced. Most of the investments were commercial decisions that had been announced previously, now bundled together into a deal to coincide with Trump’s visit.
“There are big question marks about some of the details of these deals… including what concessions the UK made to ensure it maintains these close tech ties,” Olivia O’Sullivan, director of the UK in the World program at the Chatham House think tank, told CNN.
Nick Clegg, the UK’s former deputy prime minister who was until recently Meta’s top policy executive, warned that the tech agreement is little more than “sloppy seconds from Silicon Valley.”
“We’re a kind of vassal state, technologically,” Clegg said Wednesday. “In a sense, this US-UK tech deal is just another version of the United Kingdom holding onto Uncle Sam’s coat-tails.”
Building the sort of AI infrastructure envisioned by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who was among the tech bosses invited to Wednesday’s state banquet, will require Britain to boost its energy supply. Trump has long berated Britain over its plans to stop drilling new domestic oil and gas, which could help power future AI data centers.