A survey of 250 senior IT and digital transformation decision-makers at UK organisations with more than 500 employees reveals a widening gap between AI ambition and regional readiness. Three percent of respondents say regional network infrastructure has had no impact on their AI plans; the remaining 97% have absorbed that impact in concrete ways.
The most common workaround is centralisation: 38% have kept workloads more centralised than originally planned, and 34% have moved them to a different UK region. Another 37% switched infrastructure provider, 36% moved to cloud rather than regional or edge deployment, 32% reduced deployment scale, and 29% delayed rollout.
Regional pull is growing. While London remains the centre of gravity for AI strategy, cited by 42% of enterprises as a priority geography for the next two to three years, the North West (27%), Midlands (26%), East of England including Cambridge (24%) and Scotland (24%) all feature prominently. Ninety-two percent of respondents say local connectivity availability influences where they deploy or expand AI workloads; 47% require their AI workloads to be in the same UK region as end users to meet latency targets.
That pressure looks set to increase. Nearly three-quarters (74%) of enterprises expect inferencing to become more dominant over the next two to three years, and every enterprise surveyed expects AI to increase total network capacity requirements. The combination points to a more geographically distributed AI footprint, and one that depends on high-capacity regional fibre being available where the work actually happens.
Lee Myall, CEO of Neos Networks, said: “AI is perhaps the most important technology of our lifetimes, and the UK has every reason to be confident about its AI opportunity, but confidence and readiness aren’t the same thing. Our research shows businesses believe they can accommodate significant growth, yet almost all are already adapting their plans around the infrastructure available to them.”
Neos Networks commissioned Censuswide to run the survey, conducted between 8 and 14 May 2026. A separate parallel survey of 100 senior decision-makers at UK service providers, carriers and telecoms operators was run between 8 and 15 May 2026. The research was coordinated in collaboration with Ciena.
The full report, “Where AI Can Scale: The UK Regional Readiness Report”, is available at neosnetworks.com.
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