LONDON — U.S. tech companies unveiled £31 billion of investments in Britain Tuesday, timed for the arrival of President Donald Trump on his second state visit to the country.  OpenAI, Nscale and Nvidia announced a U.K. version of Stargate — a massive AI infrastructure scheme — with its first data centers slated to be located on the site of a former coal power station in Northumberland, north-east England.  The U.K. government said Tuesday the site near Blyth would become an AI Growth Zone — areas of the country earmarked for AI data centers. It will also link to nearby Newcastle University and a business park. The government said the site could mean the addition of 5,000 new jobs in the region.     Those data centers will be powered by Nvidia chips and the company said it would ship up to 120,000 advanced GPUs to British data centers in total, funded by investments from Microsoft, Nscale, OpenAI and CoreWeave.  Around half of those GPUs will go to British data center firm Nscale, which is partnering with Microsoft to build Britain’s largest AI supercomputer in Loughton, Essex, using 23,000 Nvidia chips. OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman said Stargate UK, which will bring 8,000 GPUs to the country, would “accelerate scientific breakthroughs, improve productivity, and drive economic growth.” The biggest chunk of investment will come from Microsoft, which said it would invest £22 billion in the U.K. over the next four years. Microsoft said around half of that figure would go towards capital expenditures on AI infrastructure, while the rest would support the company’s ongoing operations in the U.K., including in AI model development, its gaming division, and general product development. “We’re focused on British pounds, not empty tech promises,” Microsoft President Brad Smith said in a press conference Tuesday. Fellow tech giant Google cut the ribbon on a new data center on Tuesday in Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire, and said it would commit to spend £5 billion in the U.K. over the next two years. AI cloud computing company CoreWeave will also invest £1.5 billion in the U.K., which includes the expansion of a data center near Airdrie, North Lanarkshire, powered by renewable energy and using Nvidia chips.  U.K. Tech Secretary Liz Kendall said: “This is a vote of confidence in Britain’s booming AI sector.”  The flurry of investment comes ahead of the two countries signing a “Technology Prosperity Deal” Thursday, pledging closer co-operation on AI, quantum, space and nuclear energy.  U.S. AI startup Scale AI will also invest more than £39 million in the U.K. over the next two years, expanding its European HQ in London and quadrupling its employees by the end of next year. Global asset manager BlackRock is putting £500 million into U.K. data centers, including £100 million for the expansion of a site west of London. Oracle, meanwhile, has reaffirmed a previously-announced $5 billion investment in the U.K. 

NORTHWOOD, England — British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and France’s Emmanuel Macron unveiled a highly-anticipated “one in, one out” pilot program to tackle illegal migration on the final day of French president’s visit to the United Kingdom. At a joint press conference Thursday, the British leader said that the “groundbreaking” effort would see the U.K. return migrants to France that have illegally crossed the English Channel. In exchange for each returned migrant, France will transfer one asylum seeker to the U.K who would be expected to have a family connection or genuine reason to seek sanctuary in Britain. French border forces will also be able to take proactive measures to stop boats in shallow waters, subject to a review by the French maritime authorities.  “We simply can’t solve a challenge like this by acting alone, and telling our allies that we won’t play ball,” Starmer said. The prime minister said the plan would “break the model” of people smuggling despite the relatively modest scale of the program, while Macron said he believed it would deter would-be smugglers and migrants seeking to make the perilous journey. It is not known how many would be returned under the program, but initial reports have suggested around 50 migrants could be sent each way per week — only a fraction of the 21,000 who have arrived via the Channel so far this year. Still, the U.K. prime minister pledged “hard-headed, aggressive action on all fronts, to break the gangs’ business, secure our borders and show that attempting to reach the U.K. will end in detention.” DOMESTIC PRESSURE Starmer is under acute pressure to reduce levels of illegal migration, having promised to “smash the gangs” when he came to power last year, and with Nigel Farage’s right-wing populist Reform UK party on the rise. When asked about whether the pilot program spearheaded by the two centrist leaders was ambitious enough, Starmer took a direct dig at Farage, saying he had been “working hard” to get an agreement “while others have been taking pictures of the problem.” Though the issue of cross-Channel migration is less politically sensitive for Macron than Starmer, the French president agreed that the arrival of the so-called small boats was “an essential issue” for both countries and vowed to reinforce efforts “on several fronts.” Macron, however, warned that the agreement over pilot scheme would be signed after judicial checks had been done, including with the European Union, and argued Brexit had in fact made illegal crossings more attractive for migrants, despite Brexiteers promising otherwise. Keir Starmer is under acute pressure to reduce levels of illegal migration, having promised to “smash the gangs” when he came to power last year. | Pool Photo by Andy Rain via EPA The press conference marked the conclusion of Macron’s state visit this week, during which the two leaders repeatedly went to great lengths to stress their personal friendship as well as the historical ties between their two countries. The two leaders also confirmed their refresh of the Lancaster House treaties and unveiled what they called the Northwood Declaration, under which they will be able to coordinate their nuclear deterrents. They also announced a new “multinational force Ukraine” based in Paris “to support a peace deal when it comes while Putin turns his back on peace.” The two leaders said their countries would also strengthen collaboration on supercomputers, satellite connectivity and work on seizing the opportunities offered by artificial intelligence.

BRUSSELS — The European Union wants to speed up quantum computing, but cybersecurity officials warn that it comes with a gargantuan risk: an impending quantum security doomsday. The European Commission on Wednesday warned that Europe has fallen behind the United States and China in rolling out the technology, in a new quantum strategy aimed at drawing investment and turning the bloc’s know-how into an economic advantage. Quantum computing is seen as the next frontier in technology. Its capabilities surpass those of existing supercomputers, enabling it to solve problems in areas ranging from drug discovery to battery technology, as well as communications and navigation tech for defense and space. However, it also presents a big problem for cybersecurity. Modern-day digital communications, internet traffic and data collections are secured using a system called public key cryptography, which relies on complex mathematics that regular computers can’t solve. But quantum computers — which are many times more powerful than today’s computers — could crack those codes easily, experts have warned. “Everything breaks,” said Nigel Smart, a professor with the computer security and industrial cryptography department at KU Leuven, a Belgian university. “Your phone, the internet, everything breaks. Not break as in doesn’t work, breaks as in, it’s not secure.” Once quantum computers reach the inflection point, it would effectively mean that most of today’s data zooming around on internet wires would be readable to anyone tapping in. A particularly eerie problem is what’s known as “store now, decrypt later,” where threat actors — notably intelligence agencies — take data that’s encrypted with public key cryptography, retain it and then unlock it once quantum computing technology is sufficiently advanced. The challenge for European countries will be to defend themselves against these emerging threats — or else fall prey to foreign spooks, cyber crooks and hackers. The European Union warned in its quantum strategy on Wednesday that the bloc is at risk of seeing promising homegrown quantum tech firms falling into the hands of foreign players. Europe is the global leader in the number of scientific publications on the technology, but private investment has mostly gone elsewhere: Europe attracts only 5 percent of global private quantum funding, compared to over 50 percent by the U.S. and 40 percent by China, according to the EU’s calculations. The details of the strategy were first reported by POLITICO. 2030 DEADLINE In parallel with the Commission’s grand plan to speed up on quantum, European authorities have been developing guidelines to mitigate the risks of encryption being broken. Cybersecurity authorities released a roadmap last month to transition to post-quantum cryptography, a type of algorithm that could resist quantum computers. It suggested that EU countries protect critical infrastructure with post-quantum cybersecurity by the end of 2030 — a deadline first reported by POLITICO. U.S. tech giant IBM, a frontrunner in quantum tech, recently announced it expects to have the first workable quantum computer by 2029. | Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images The dates proposed by European cyber officials roughly aligned with those put forward by the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. U.S. tech giant IBM, a frontrunner in quantum tech, recently announced it expects to have the first workable quantum computer by 2029. That underlines the urgency of securing critical data. “The fact that we have this roadmap now and that all of the EU member states agreed on this … I think this is really a big step,” said Stephan Ehlen, a cryptography expert at the German cybersecurity agency and one of the authors of the roadmap. But making a plan is just the start. “This is not only about these algorithms, it’s a huge migration problem … It affects billions and billions of systems,” said Bart Preneel, a cryptographer also from KU Leuven. “It’s a very complex problem that you cannot solve in a few A4s.” It’s also a problem that hits home with national governments and their security and intelligence services. Several European governments have imposed export restrictions on quantum technology; the real concern for governments is whether their own communications are affected, and whether “everything they’re doing can be exposed,” Preneel said. Some experts have downplayed a doomsday scenario for quantum, arguing that even if computers are developed that can break modern encryption, it still requires a significant amount of work and money to do so. The EU has no excuse not to push on, said Manfred Lochter, another official at the German cyber agency. “If you don’t have access to quantum technologies, then you’re lost.”