After another dismal week for our beleaguered Prime Minister comes the unwelcome news that AstraZeneca, the global pharmaceutical giant and largest company listed on the UK stock market, has paused plans to invest £200m in a UK research facility. This is hot on the heels of it scrapping the £450m expansion of its vaccine plant in Liverpool earlier in the year and is just the latest move by a major drug company to freeze investment in the UK as the industry seeks a more favourable commercial environment that rewards innovation, with pressure mounting from the Trump administration to cut the cost of drugs for Americans. Pharmaceutical research and development in the UK has lagged behind global trends in recent years according to recent report from the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry and it is something that the government is going to need to start taking seriously.
Maybe it’s just that investment in the UK is starting to take different forms though and we seem to be fast becoming the darling of tech investors, with billions of pounds pouring into AI infrastructure and data centres. We’ve already had Microsoft pledge £2.5bn over the next three years to expand its data centre footprint, and more recently it has been reported that Google is in talks to build a massive data centre in the north east of England. This should be welcomed and although the UK may not yet rival the US or Asia, we seem to be staking a serious claim as a global AI hub, supported by the government’s TechFirst initiative to deliver AI skills training to 7.5 million workers by 2030. As ever. the vast amount of power these centres consume will continue to raise uncomfortable questions about the UK’s long-term energy infrastructure and sustainability.
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