The evidence from the FT is pointing to a UK connection for Nscale, the company that American money is being poured into (with a timely announcement last week when Trump was in the UK

The Companies House application to create Nscale Global Holdings Limited lists the UK as the country where Josh Payne is “usually resident”, and Payne’s LinkedIn also says he is now London-based. But ownership obviously matters more than position.

The FT aren’t very impressed

TK Maxx is now a British high street institution, but nobody claims it is British.

A simple way to answer this question is to look at who owns Nscale. As of June, the entire share capital of Nscale Global Holdings Limited (the name cited in press release, and the only UK company of which Payne is an active director) was owned by Australia’s Arkon Energy Pty LTD, according to a confirmation statement posted on Companies House:

The senior figures from Arkon told the FT that investors in companies like Arkon and Nscale are owned by people all over the world.

Which is why presumably the FT Alphaville aren’t too worried that Nscale wants to be known as British when it’s going to be funded from America and with an Australian parent.

What ought to matter to us in the UK is where the work that America is going to invest, is doing its work in the UK.

As I’ve been learning these past few months, Britain is actually a quite important centre for AI and that’s because we have pretty clever people working in very posh universities.

I wrote an article over the weekend on Slough and how this town stands between Oxford and Cambridge to house data centres.

There are other candidates to Britain’s Silicon valley

I don’t want to contradict the FT or the Mail on Sunday, I’d like to agree with them that what is happening in the UK is good news.

I’m a little on the old side, to get stuck into Quantum Computing or Quant sensing or Quant communication. These are the way that Britain is reinventing computing , sensing and communication and its ushering in a new era.

This stuff delivers AI and it goes further (or so I’m told). I’m also told that people who do this stuff are learning at our universities and working in our country and that suggests to me that we do have a debt and equity investment opportunity on our doorstep which our pensions could and should be invested in.

We may have a very irritated fiduciary community and a none too happy pension minister and a lot of disputing over mandation. But I can’t but wish we’d spend less time on  how  we write the Pension Schemes Act and more researching the investment opportunities that get us all paid the pensions we should have.

While I’m delighted that Australia are holding the parent and America pumping in money, I am sure there is space for us to invest in our own back yard.