Civo, the sovereign cloud and AI platform, has announced the first of 40 UK Edge data centres, opening in Hertfordshire.
Civo’s rollout will deliver a combined one gigawatt of high-performance capacity across the country, built for the workloads the next decade runs on: inference at the edge, rather than training on the other side of the world.
The Hertfordshire site will open at eight megawatts, rising to 38 megawatts on the same plot and fit-out of the building is underway. Five further locations totalling 150 megawatts have been secured across the UK, including Lancashire, Greater Manchester, London and Oxfordshire, with the remaining sites planned over the next three years.
Building a national network reduces exposure when geopolitical pressure reaches infrastructure and it keeps capacity under British control rather than at the end of someone else’s supply chain.
“Britain has the talent. What it needs is infrastructure to match it,” said Mark Boost, CEO of Civo. “Policy alone will not deliver that. Compute, cooling and density have to exist physically, in this country, close to the organisations using them. Our distributed Edge network gives UK organisations sovereign, high-density infrastructure where the processing actually needs to happen and gives international organisations a secure, compliant UK home for their services and data.”
All of Civo’s sites are built for direct-to-chip liquid cooling, with coolant running across a plate in contact with the silicon and each facility has been designed around the NVIDIA Vera Rubin systems it will hold.
Civo will be among the first cloud providers in the UK to offer the NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform, the successor to Blackwell, with up to five times the inference performance. The Vera Rubin NVL72 system carries 288GB of HBM4 memory per GPU and brings together 72 Rubin GPUs and 36 Vera CPUs in a single rack.
