CoreWeave drops £1bn in UK datacenters – but don't expect the latest Nvidia magic just yet

As the UK government reaffirms its aspirations to become an AI superpower, CoreWeave says two new GPU bit barns packed to the brim with Nvidia accelerators are ready for business.

Located in Crawley and the London Docklands and developed in collaboration with colocation providers Digital Realty and Global Switch, respectively, the two sites are part of a £1 billion($1.2 billion USD) investment by the New Jersey-based datacenter operator.

"The UK is an important market for CoreWeave, with our European headquarters here and further operational plans for the country," Mike Mattacola, chief business officer at CoreWeave, said in a canned statement. "We are pleased to be partnering with Digital Realty and Global Switch to deliver the next generation of AI infrastructure in the UK."

But before anyone gets too excited, these sites aren't outfitted with Nvidia's latest and greatest Blackwell chips. Those parts only began making their way to market in Q4 2024. Instead, the facilities are using accelerators based on Nvidia's older Hopper architecture, which first made its debut in late 2022.

CoreWeave opted for Nvidia's H200 and 400 Gb/s Quantum-2 InfiniBand networking. Introduced in 2023, the H200 is among Nvidia's most advanced GPUs of the Hopper generation, with up to 141 GB of speedy HBM3e memory good for 4.8 TB/s of memory bandwidth and nearly 4 petaFLOPS of sparse FP8 performance apiece.

However, with more than a terabyte of high bandwidth memory — eight GPUs — per server, CoreWeave's UK datacenters should be better equipped to support ever growing frontier models, which have stretched existing systems to their limits.

For instance, a single H200 system is now able to run Meta's largest model Llama 3.1 405B at full 16-bit resolution. Previously, the model would have had to be distributed across two nodes or quantized to 8-bits to run on an H100-based system.

Just how many of these GPUs are housed at the Crawley and London Docklands sites hasn't been disclosed. The Register reached out to CoreWeave for comment; we'll let you know if we can get any specifics. However, past deployments have typically involved clusters of 10,000 or more accelerators.

The two datacenters are the last in a string of large-scale deployments over the past two years and reflect CoreWeave's ambition to break into new markets. Last spring, CoreWeave expanded its operations across the pond, announcing London as the location of its European headquarters alongside an initial investment of £1 billion. In October, during the International Investment Summit, CoreWeave inflated that investment to £1.75 billion ($2.1 billion USD).

These efforts have been supported by a flood of venture capital and debt financing totaling billions of dollars amid the AI boom. CoreWeave currently operates 28 datacenters around the globe with plans to bring 10 additional bit barns on line by the end of 2025.

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While the datacenter builder is breaking into the UK and European markets, the British government is doubling down on its efforts to establish itself as an AI superpower.

On Monday, the nation outlined the AI Opportunities Action Plan, which will see the government adopt 50 recommendations made by a venture capitalist to use AI to boost productivity by 1.5 percent a year. The economic impact of the strategy is expected to generate £47 billion ($57 billion) a year.

Aspirations aside, supporting the additional AI infrastructure necessary to see these plans to fruition may prove troublesome for the UK's National Grid, as its CEO has previously warned. ®