UK government-backed Sovereign AI has announced the launch of its new £500 million fund, designed to give early-stage AI companies in the UK access to the funds, compute, and strategic assets needed to scale rapidly and compete on a global scale.
Taking to LinkedIn, Sovereign AI announced the funding, along with news of its first investment – Callosum – an intelligent systems company working on the development of chips and intelligence. Details were also shared of the first raft of companies to receive compute, including Prima Mente, an AI biology company; Cosine, an AI coding agent; and twig, a full-stack AI bioengineering company.
The announcement offered an insight into what was on offer for UK AI providers, such as access to AI supercomputers with up to one million GPU hours per startup, early-stage investment of up to £20 million, and strategic assets to support with the creation of AI datasets and autonomous lab infrastructure. £282 million is also being dedicated to support AI startups with research and development, with a funding call to be announced for the creation of new datasets and other assets.
The UK government shares: “Sovereign AI is designed to be different from any previous government-backed unit, acting like a venture capital fund with the muscle of the state behind it – moving fast, backing ambition and cutting through the red tape that so often holds brilliant ideas back. It will invest directly in the UK’s most promising AI startups, help them scale quickly, and give them the support they need to compete with the best in the world.”
It also provides further details of available support for businesses, including “fast-track” visa decisions and ten cost-free visas to allow for international AI talent to be employed, as well as “hands on” government support in navigating data access, early procurement opportunities, validation, and regulation.
Wider trend: Health AI
HTN was joined by a panel including Ciara Moore, EPR operations director at Bath, Salisbury and Great Western Group, Stuart Cooney, CTO at Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust, and Julian Wiggins, healthcare solution director at Rackspace Technology, for a discussion focusing on cloud adoption, AI maturity, and cyber resilience. Panellists explored how healthcare organisations are tackling delivery, legacy systems, and rising digital expectations, and what this means for future strategy and plans. We also looked at the fragmented cloud landscape, integration pressures, legacy infrastructure, AI, and the growing urgency around cyber resilience, finishing by asking where NHS leaders should prioritise investment and focus in 2026.
The Scottish Government has published its five-year AI strategy to 2031 alongside an “AI Stack” detailing areas where action should be taken to ensure an effective response to AI as an emerging technology. By the end of the strategy’s lifecycle in 2031, the government hopes to achieve outcomes including equality of access “based on widespread literacy, trust and confidence in engaging with AI”, collective data stewardship and data sharing leadership to promote the safe use of data for good, embedded AI in critical national infrastructure to support public service delivery, and tech clusters and a pipeline of start-ups and scale-ups in national and international markets.
A US National Institutes of Health-supported study has developed an AI algorithm trained on EHR data to predict rare disease, with plans to scale over time to suggest when disease may appear, and how patients will respond to treatment. The WEakly Supervised Transformer (WEST) algorithm is reportedly capable of using “noisy”, incomplete, inaccurate, or non-informative data from EHRs to predict whether a patient is likely to have a specific rare condition. The algorithm was initially tested using EHR data from patients at risk for two rare lung diseases: pulmonary hypertension and severe asthma, achieving the highest rated predictive performance among all baseline models in identifying those diagnosed by clinicians.
