UK sovereign cloud provider Civo has broken ground on its first liquid-cooled edge data centre in Hertfordshire, the opening site in a planned 40-location network that will deliver a combined one gigawatt of high-performance compute capacity across Britain.
The Hertfordshire facility opens at 8MW, scaling to 38MW on the same plot. Five further sites totalling 150MW have been secured across Lancashire, Greater Manchester, London and Oxfordshire, with the remaining locations to follow over three years.
The rollout is built around inference rather than training. Where the first generation of AI investments went into massive centralised clusters for model development, Civo's network is designed for the agents, autonomous vehicles and industrial robotics that need decisions processed near the device rather than routed to a distant data centre. CEO Mark Boost put it plainly: “Britain has the talent. What it needs is infrastructure to match it. Policy alone will not deliver that. Compute, cooling and density have to exist physically, in this country, close to the organisations using them.”
All 40 sites are designed for direct-to-chip liquid cooling, with coolant running across a plate in contact with the silicon. The company runs computational fluid dynamics modelling on each site before construction begins, so thermal behaviour at full load is understood before hardware ships. Heat recovered from the facilities feeds district heating networks serving homes, factories and greenhouses near each location.
Civo will be among the first cloud providers in the UK to offer the NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 platform, the successor to Blackwell, targeting late 2027. The system carries 288GB of HBM4 memory per GPU and combines 72 Rubin GPUs with 36 Vera CPUs in a single rack, delivering up to five times the inference performance of the current generation. Early-access pricing starts at $10.00 per hour. Existing capacity on NVIDIA B300, B200, H100 and H200 instances is already live.
The network is built on Civo's in-house open cloud stack, which the company says gives customers complete data sovereignty and UK compliance. The company cites the University of Oxford, Qualcomm and Orbital Materials among its existing customers.
The announcement came on the opening day of Civo Navigate, the company's developer conference in London.
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