Today, Locai Labs, the UK’s sovereign AI company, and Civo, the British sovereign cloud provider, have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to undertake Project Mercury. The programme aims to build the UK’s first pre-trained, sovereign LLMs, designed to reclaim British digital autonomy.
For a decade, the UK has operated as a "digital tenant," reliant on foreign-owned hyperscale cloud providers and AI model developers for its most sensitive computational needs. These companies are subject to control by their host nation governments, and we have seen them required to remove services from individuals who have criticised these governments.
Last year, Locai Labs launched Locai, a general AI assistant powered by Locai L1-Large, the UK’s first foundational LLM, marking a watershed moment for British technology and the nation’s role in the global AI race.
The Mercury Series aims to end this dependency and prove that the UK possesses the talent, the infrastructure, and the vision to develop, train, and host frontier-level AI entirely on home soil.
By providing a domestic alternative to foreign infrastructure and AI, Mercury reduces the geopolitical vulnerabilities associated with overseas-controlled data centres and AI models and ensures that British data and the use of AI by UK citizens stay under British jurisdiction. The Mercury Series will be a family of LLMs engineered to meet the stringent security, residency, and compliance requirements of both the public and private sectors. From the secure digitisation of public-sector services to providing a competitive edge for private-sector enterprises in finance, healthcare, and engineering,
These new models will be available from Civo Sovereign Cloud resident in the UK, or deployed and hosted on-premise within an enterprise’s own IT infrastructure.
The series will feature a range of models built and trained entirely in the UK:
- Edge Intelligence: Efficient 0.8-30 billion-parameter models designed for local, low-latency applications.
- Frontier Power: 256 billion-parameter models capable of handling the most complex generative AI tasks.
This collaboration arrives as the UK government accelerates its investment in domestic AI through the £500 million Sovereign AI Fund.
The Mercury Series is the direct answer to the national goal of making the UK a maker of AI rather than just a taker of AI developed elsewhere. Furthermore, the Mercury Series will be developed using 100 per cent renewable energy, proving that the future of British AI is as sustainable as it is powerful.
"This partnership is a pivotal moment for UK AI," said James Drayson, co-Founder and CEO of Locai Labs.
"By combining our advanced Mercury model development with Civo’s UK sovereign cloud infrastructure, we’re creating a trusted, homegrown AI ecosystem that meets the highest standards of security, sustainability, and performance.
The technology of the future is being built right here. AI’s coming home!"
"Together, we are building a local ecosystem by creating a domestic alternative that reduces reliance on foreign-based infrastructure," said Mark Boost, Founder and CEO of Civo.
"This partnership proves the UK can develop, train and host sovereign LLMs entirely on home soil, showing what two UK‑founded companies can deliver for the security and trust of other UK‑based enterprises."
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