NVIDIA’s event at Town Hall was extraordinary. Hearing Jensen Huang and PM Keir Starmer discuss the UK’s AI future felt like witnessing history.
Some reflections on this historic moment and what it means for London’s AI renaissance.
An introduction
by Emilie Edberg, Managing Partner
The true measure of an individual, a company, a city—or even a civilisation—is not found in its present achievements or in the legacy it carries, but in the future it dares to dream.
London, the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, now stands on the threshold of another transformation: becoming one of the world’s defining forces in artificial intelligence.
This is no coincidence. Britain’s history has always been one of pioneering progress. The foundations of today’s AI revolution are rooted in this very soil.
At Bletchley Park, Alan Turing and his team cracked the uncrackable Enigma code—an achievement that reshaped the course of history. But Turing’s true gift was far greater: the vision of machines that could learn. His 1950 paper, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, introduced the now-famous Turing Test and set forth theories of machine learning decades before neural networks became a reality.
The intercept control room in hut 6 at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, the British forces’ intelligence centre during WWIl Credit: Photo: GETTY
IN THE BEGINNING
Just outside London, in 1989, Tim Berners-Lee gave the world the World Wide Web. His invention did more than democratise access to knowledge, it created the vast data ecosystem that made AI’s breakthroughs possible. Without it, the transformer architectures and large language models of today would be unimaginable.
British innovators continued to lead. Geoffrey Hinton’s pioneering research in neural networks and his AlexNet breakthrough in 2012 lit the spark for modern deep learning. Demis Hassabis and DeepMind went further still, solving the 50-year protein folding problem with AlphaFold, and pushing the boundaries of reinforcement learning and multimodal AI.
Geoffrey Hinton (left) pictured with Sarah Sabour, whose work on capsule networks dramatically improved human-like vision
Today, King’s Cross—once the beating heart of the railway age—has become Europe’s largest hub of AI talent. Google’s DeepMind, Meta, Microsoft, and Anthropic have all chosen this district as home, creating a concentration of innovation that rivals Silicon Valley.
At the centre of this extraordinary ecosystem lies Bottaccio’s new venue, Town Hall. A historic architectural landmark reimagined as a home where the global conversation around technology, culture, and society takes form. Our mission is both to represent and to help lead this engine of change.
Our stage hosted a defining moment. NVIDIA, together with Prime Minister Keir Starmer, announced the largest AI infrastructure rollout in UK history—up to £31 billion committed to deploying advanced GPU technology nationwide. To witness Jensen Huang, a visionary founder, standing in our Town Hall for such an announcement was more than a milestone in business. It was a symbol of the convergence between global enterprise and the deeper forces shaping the future.
Panel with U.K. Secretary of State for Business and Trade Peter Kyle (left), U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick (middle) and NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang. (right)
In NVIDIA’s story, we recognise the very principles on which our own company was built: the idea that a true revolution in any field is born from a man of integrity, a dreamer, whose inner state of intuition and vision precedes all creation.
It is a privilege to welcome one of the world’s most influential technology leaders in a city that has nurtured pioneers for centuries. The event reaffirms that the future belongs to those who acknowledge themselves as the creators and projectors of the world we live in.
At Town Hall, we hold a simple promise. To continue inspiring a future where the art of dreaming is the most powerful technology of all.
With NVIDIA building the infrastructure that will power the next generation of artificial intelligence, London once again finds itself at the helm of history. As our founder Elio D’Anna reminds us: history is destiny. Yesterday, those words resonated louder than ever.
