Development by UK firm Nscale heralded by ministers as largest of its kind in country loses anchor tenant
The development of a huge AI datacentre hailed by the UK government has received a fresh setback after Microsoft pulled out of the project over concerns about power supplies.
The development by the British company Nscale, heralded by ministers as the country’s largest AI datacentre when it was announced in 2025, was planned to open at Loughton in Essex next year.
Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft, defended the company's use of visas and green cards.
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Microsoft President Brad Smith warned that US immigration policies could drive AI talent overseas.
"Let's not put that at risk," Smith said.
The Trump administration recently suspended Microsoft and other tech firms from a green card program.
If America wants to win the AI race, sending the world's brightest engineers packing might not be a winning strategy.
That's the warning from Microsoft President Brad Smith, who said the Trump administration's immigration crackdown risks driving the next generation of AI talent away from the United States.
"I think we should all be worried about sending intentionally or inadvertently or otherwise, signals that send the most talented next wave of AI software engineers to other countries rather than the United States," Smith said in an episode of Politico's "The Decoded Podcast" that aired on Thursday.
His comments come after the Trump administration announced last week that it was suspending Microsoft, Adobe, and several other technology companies from a federal program that sponsors foreign workers for permanent residency.
Vice President JD Vance accused Microsoft of abusing the Permanent Labor Certification, or PERM, program by laying off American employees while hiring lower-paid foreign workers.
Smith, who Business Insider reported was recently put in charge of Microsoft's communications, pushed back against those allegations, saying the administration had presented a misleading picture of Microsoft's hiring practices.
US Vice President JD Vance has criticized Microsoft's use of visa programs.
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"What was presented as Microsoft replacing 6,000 people who lost their jobs with 9,000 foreigners was frankly completely off base," he said.
Smith said most of the company's visa and green card applications concerned existing employees rather than new hires, adding that Microsoft had hired 9,200 American workers in its last fiscal year.
"That was left out of the narrative," he said.
He also rejected suggestions that Microsoft pays foreign workers less than their American counterparts, saying employees are compensated under the same system regardless of immigration status.
As part of our ongoing H-1B Fallout series, Business Insider previously reported that the Trump administration's shifting immigration policies have prompted some international workers to explore opportunities abroad, including in countries like the UK, Germany, and Canada.
An analysis of federal data by Business Insider found that certified H-1B applications fell 10% in the first nine months of fiscal year 2026 compared with the same period a year earlier. Applications for data scientists, however, rose 22.5%, highlighting continued demand for specialized AI talent.
On the Politico podcast, Smith cited immigrants' economic contributions as evidence of what America stands to lose.
He said that five of the six technology and science medal recipients recently honored by President Donald Trump had immigrated to the United States.
President Donald Trump awards tech execs and founders some of the country's highest scientific honors.
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According to Smith, the companies associated with those five individuals collectively represent more than a quarter of the S&P 500's market value.
Their contributions, he said, benefit not just technology employees but ordinary Americans whose retirement savings and pension funds are invested in those businesses.
"Think about what those five individuals have done for the well being, even the wealth and standard of living, of Americans across the country," Smith said.
Microsoft AI recently announced its latest model MAI-Base-2.
AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman compared the model to a similar offering from OpenAI.
Microsoft trained its model more efficiently than OpenAI, he said in an internal meeting.
Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman told employees an in-house model was better than a similar offering from OpenAI, one of the software giant's biggest customers and partners.
"We now have a stronger pre-trained base model than the model that currently powers GPT 5.6 Sol," Suleyman said during a town hall meeting with employees on Thursday. "And in fact, we used one-quarter of the compute that OpenAI used to train their model."
Pre-training is the first stage of building an AI model, when it learns patterns from huge amounts of text, images, and other information. This takes massive amounts of expensive computing power, so Microsoft could save money if it's worked out a way to do this more efficiently.
Suleyman said Microsoft privately tested this model against OpenAI models, including one nicknamed "Spud" that powers GPT-5.6. He added that Microsoft's model performed better on tests measuring how well AI can understand and predict patterns in information.
The comparisons are based on technical information Microsoft has about OpenAI's models, Suleyman said.
"Privately and confidentially, we've also compared it to the OpenAI models," Suleyman told employees, while suggesting that Microsoft has special access to information on how OpenAI models perform.
It's notable that Suleyman would choose to highlight limitations of OpenAI models, even in private discussions. Microsoft has invested billions of dollars in OpenAI, and owns a stake in the startup that is likely worth more than $100 billion. Any criticism of OpenAI could potentially dent the value of this huge investment.
The two companies also have a major partnership, with Microsoft offering OpenAI models to its Azure cloud customers. Microsoft has used OpenAI models for its own products such as Copilot, too.
But the relationship between the two companies has frayed in the past year or so. Increasingly, Microsoft has tried to branch out from OpenAI, including by working on its own models.
Suleyman also said Microsoft's new AI model used "12 times less computation than was used for DeepSeek, for example, on compute efficiency."
Suleyman didn't specify which DeepSeek model, but a public blog post described the pre-training of MAI-Base-2 being a lot more efficient than a similar offering from the Chinese lab, called DeepSeek-V4-Pro-Base.
Microsoft in March created a new combined team for its commercial and consumer Copilot products and reassigned Suleyman to focus on building AI models in the company's superintelligence unit.
Microsoft declined to comment and OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday.
Ukraine has struck a major blow to Russia’s digital infrastructure. Since last Thursday, Ukrainian drones have carried out a series of attacks that destroyed three large data centers belonging to Yandex — known as “the Kremlin’s Google”— on the outskirts of Moscow. The Yandex Taxi ride-hailing app and the group’s payments service, Yandex Pay, have been temporarily taken offline. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy even said the bombings disabled Russian bots.
Microsoft took the wraps off the third-generation of its in-house AI chip, as part of a plan to reduce its reliance on buying processors from Nvidia.
The Maia 300 chip will be used for the tech giant’s multi-gigawatt deployments in 2027, making it the primary inference system for Microsoft products and services. Reuters reported it plans to potentially deploy more than 1 million of the chips next year.
According to a blog post from EVP Scott Guthrie, the company expects Maia 300 to deliver 40% more tokens per megawatt compared to leading GPU-based systems without naming Nvidia.
The Maia 300 is built as a single system, with software, silicon, physical rack infrastructure, networking, and data centres co-designed to operate as a single platform.
Guthrie noted a 96-chip rack offers seven times the rack-scale token throughput of Microsoft’s Maia 200. He said the new chip is “designed with an inference-first architecture optimized for long-context, memory-intensive and decode-heavy AI workloads”.
The Maia 200 chip powers the company’s production workloads, including Microsoft 365 Copilot, as well as OpenAI models running on Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing service.
Sie macht nicht so viele Schlagzeilen, wie der Krieg selbst, aber die Hightech-Front ist nicht weniger wichtig als die Front. Beim Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft ist darüber ein interessanter Artikel erschienen, den ich übersetzt habe, weil er mich nachdenklich gemacht hat. Beginn der Übersetzung: Sie tragen keine Uniform, aber diese US-Unternehmen kämpfen für die […]
As the controversy over AI safety grows, another debate is emerging. Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, has said that artificial intelligence should pay taxes to compensate for the jobs that will be destroyed by the deployment of this technology.
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