Britain’s future lies in sovereign, distributed AI — Not in building bigger models
The logic of scale is seductive. Organisations like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic argue that bigger models bring predictable gains in reasoning and creativity. But evidence is emerging that this assumption is starting to falter and that generative AI may not sustain the exponential demand for GPUs that so much global investment is built upon.
If that proves true, history offers a useful analogy. In the 1950s and 60s, computing was dominated by vast, centralised mainframes that only the wealthiest institutions could afford. The assumption then, too, was that bigger central terminals would always be better. The real revolution, of course, came later when compute power migrated from research labs to the desks of workers around the world.
Today’s hyperscale language models are our new mainframes: powerful, but centralised, fragile, and controlled by a handful of global firms.
According to RAND (2024), the economics of foundation models are already “precarious,” with soaring compute and energy costs delivering ever-smaller performance gains. Beyond the economic and environmental implications of this, they also raise deeper questions about sovereignty.
True sovereignty means controlling how data is processed, protected, and governed. That’s impossible when relying on models hosted or operated abroad. Even “UK instances” of foreign models cannot change the fact that model training and governance policies are decided elsewhere.
As Harrison Kirby, Author of “Exploring GenAIOps” and co-founder at Great Wave AI, has argued:
“AI sovereignty isn’t just about data location—it’s about control, governance, and accountability. Just think back to COVID-19, when even the closest allies competed for scarce vaccine resources. What happens to our ‘sovereign’ instances of overseas tech when priorities diverge?”
Beyond sovereignty, there are structural security risks. Large models must process data in unencrypted form — meaning every sensitive input, from defence intelligence to patient records, is briefly visible inside a foreign-controlled system. How long can that remain acceptable?
Finally, sovereignty must mean accountability. In recent weeks, both AWS and Azure have experienced global scale outages created from errors incurred in the US. Other countries have had to accept the problems but have had no ability to identify or mitigate the issues. This issue of being a passenger in someone else’s technology “vehicle” will only get worse in an age of hyper-scale GenAI.
Fortunately, a new alternative is emerging. Advances in model compression now allow smaller, domain-specific models to run securely on local devices. These systems can operate offline, respect privacy boundaries, and collaborate through encrypted orchestration layers – like the UK’s orchestration challenger; Great Wave AI – which are the digital equivalent of an AI operating system.
This is an important historical parallel: control of the operating system has been the foundation of US technology dominance for four decades. Owning the orchestration layer, rather than the models themselves, could be Britain’s strategic advantage.
We are already seeing promising pilots in policing where compact language models could be deployed directly into patrol cars, giving officers secure, instant AI assistance even without an internet connection.
These local models can handle sensitive data within police networks, providing decision support without exposing information to external servers. That’s what sovereign AI looks like in practice: distributed, resilient, and locally governed.
Britain’s opportunity lies not in building the next trillion-parameter model, but in building the system that connects them – the orchestration layer that determines how intelligence flows securely across our digital infrastructure.
This approach does more than avoid the hyperscale arms race; it positions the UK at the forefront of the next computing revolution, where value comes from interoperability, governance, and control.
By leading in standards, transparency, and secure federation, the UK can set the global benchmark for trustworthy, distributed AI ensuring that our future systems are not only powerful but sovereign and secure by design.
