CoreWeave, an American AI infrastructure group, is investing an initial £1 billion in Britain, in the third significant boost to the UK’s fast-growing AI sector this week.

The company has established a London office which will serve as its European headquarters and is opening two data centres in the capital this year, with plans to expand further in 2025.

News of the investment comes in the same week that Wayve, a British firm developing driverless cars, raised $1 billion from Softbank, Nvidia and Microsoft, and San Francisco’s Scale AI announced plans to open its European headquarters in Britain.

Rishi Sunak, who has a stated ambition to transform the UK into a world leader in regulation and innovation of the technology, said the latest investment would: “further cement the UK’s position as an AI and tech superpower.”

CoreWeave, recently valued at $19 billion, is a cloud service company for businesses who need access to huge amounts of high performance computer power, known as “compute”.

While far from a household name, it is well-known in the tech world as a provider of access to the highly-prized AI computer processors, known as graphics processing units (GPUs), made by Nvidia. Demand for the GPUs is so high, Elon Musk once called them “harder to get than drugs”.

They are stored in data centres and their capacity can be rented by companies for power-hungry work, such as training large language models and running AI applications. CoreWeave’s founder, Michael Intrator, has dubbed the chips “the Maserati” of cloud infrastructure.

CoreWeave was founded in 2017 by the commodities traders Intrator, Brian Venturo and Brannin McBee, who initially built up compute in order to mine cryptocurrency. It has raised a total of $3.5 billion so far to build the business, including $642 million in December last year and $1.1 billion at the start of this month.

Mike Mattacola, chief business officer at CoreWeave, told The Times that the UK move was an “easy decision” because of the country’s strong talent pool, world class universities and “a lot of developers that need compute”. He said the outlay was relatively small compared with its American operations, leaving it room to grow.

“If you look at the supercomputers we’re building in the US today, they’re anything between half a billion to a billion dollars plus each time.

“It’s really the initial investment. We think it’s enough to get compute into the market, stimulate the market and get people what they need. I definitely think there’s a lot of opportunities to expand the footprint and the infrastructure in the UK quite quickly.”

While the first infrastructure investment is slated for London, Mattacola said data centres could reach the capital if they were built “up to around Newcastle touching the border with Scotland and still have pretty strong performance for AI workloads”.

• Rishi Sunak: I want to cement this country’s place as a scientific superpower

Sunak and Michelle Donelan, the science, innovation and technology secretary, welcomed the announcement as a sign of confidence in UK tech.

“It will lead to new, highly-paid jobs and countless opportunities for our brightest AI minds and startups as the UK continues to cement its global AI powerhouse credentials,” Donelan said.

However, there are concerns that soaring demand for such computer capacity to power AI will put pressure on the UK’s energy infrastructure.

John Pettigrew, chief executive of the National Grid, said last month that the power needed for data centres would increase sixfold in the next decade, as quantum computing and AI develop.

CoreWeave said it did “multi-year planning” as part of this investment in the UK and, at the moment, energy infrastructure was not seen as a concern but would be continually monitored.