MSAI signs GBP £50m deal to expand UK AI infrastructure

MSAI has signed a GBP £50 million financing partnership with EPOKA to expand AI infrastructure in the UK.

Under the agreement, MSAI's Scotland campus will become its main AI compute site, while Manchester will remain the corporate headquarters and the base for development of its MOTHER EXO robotics platform.

EPOKA, a Denmark-based hardware specialist, has agreed to provide a guaranteed GBP £50 million residual buyback commitment on MSAI's hardware assets. The structure uses Residual Value Insurance and is intended to unlock purchasing power for further hardware deployment.

All incoming hardware will be installed at the Scotland site, which MSAI describes as its largest sovereign hardware deployment to date. The expansion will support a multi-vendor environment built around NVIDIA and AMD graphics processing units.

MSAI is also preparing to add European and UK chip options, including ARM processors, as they become commercially available. It says this approach will give customers a wider range of infrastructure choices.

Sovereign focus

MSAI is positioning the build-out as part of a push for AI systems hosted and managed within UK legal jurisdiction. It says keeping compute clusters inside the UK removes exposure to overseas legal frameworks such as the US CLOUD Act.

The company links that position to data residency requirements and security expectations in regulated sectors, including government, defence-adjacent research and other organisations seeking tighter control over where data and metadata are stored and processed.

MSAI argues that dependence on foreign cloud providers can create risks including regulatory uncertainty, pricing changes and operational reliance on remote systems. The financing arrangement is intended to support a locally controlled alternative for customers seeking single-tenant infrastructure.

Product stack

The infrastructure expansion also supports MSAI's software and model portfolio. Its core system includes MOTHER CORE, a 7-billion-parameter model focused on science, mathematics and chain-of-thought reasoning, along with multi-agent workflow orchestration.

It also includes MOTHER EXO, which MSAI describes as a multimodal world model for humanoid robotics, autonomous vehicle routing and flight navigation. A third element, IntuiSTUDIO, is aimed at workflow automation in media and broadcast operations.

While Scotland will handle the main compute deployment, Manchester will remain the centre for corporate operations and robotics development. The split reflects MSAI's effort to separate infrastructure scale-up from its existing development base.

Customer access

MSAI says mainstream businesses will be able to use the expanded infrastructure for local AI processing without being tied to a single vendor. To help manage that setup, the company has partnered with Canopy Cloud as an infrastructure broker and cloud optimisation partner.

Canopy Cloud will coordinate configuration and align workloads with the hardware environment. MSAI says the arrangement is intended to give customers clearer costs, shorter procurement cycles and less exposure to foreign cloud platforms.

The financing deal also points to a broader model of collaboration between UK and European technology groups on large-scale AI infrastructure. For MSAI, it provides a way to add hardware without relying on conventional cloud expansion models.

"We're delighted to be partnering with MSAI on this agreement. With our Residual Value Solution, we help MSAI de-risk their investment and unlock the funding needed, backed by more than 35 years of experience. That kind of certainty is exactly what unlocks financing and lets ambitious infrastructure projects like this one move from plan to reality. We're excited to support MSAI's growth in sovereign UK AI compute and to help build this kind of European collaboration, and more broadly, we're proud to play a part in the continued development of the AI sector," said Christian Stenild, Chief Executive Officer, EPOKA.

MSAI says the arrangement is particularly relevant for clients operating in tightly regulated environments. It sees demand from public sector and commercial organisations that want more control over how AI systems are hosted and trained.

"For organizations operating within regulated areas like government or defence-adjacent research, data security is critical. This investment means our clients have choices in how they insulate their operations from overseas interference and allows us to support government, defence, and commercial clients as well as maintaining the continuous dataset training needed for our underlying MOTHER model ecosystem," said Scott Collin, Head of Government & Defence, MSAI.

MSAI also tied the expansion to its broader position on accountability for data and infrastructure ownership in AI. It says local deployment and support are central to how it plans to develop systems for UK and European users.

"When we talk about digital assets as critical infrastructure, we are really talking about where our data lives and who is accountable for it. Building sovereign AI infrastructure for the UK & Europe is our one mission. We are scaling our hardware footprint in Scotland while keeping our development head office in Manchester, because we believe the systems managing local workflows should be built and supported here. Publishing our core weights on Hugging Face is a deliberate choice; it ensures that output verification is treated as an open, auditable reality rather than a corporate marketing claim. This agreement with EPOKA is a practical financial mechanism that allows us to expand that footprint without relying on foreign cloud platforms," said Christopher Kenna, Chief Executive Officer & Founder, MSAI.