Under the new AI Opportunities Action Plan, serial entrepreneur Matt Clifford has called for the creation of a group of ‘AI Growth Zones’ dotted across the UK to attract clusters of AI expertise, in which normal planning processes would be overturned in favour of a fast-track approval system.

The first of these zones has already been named as Culham, Oxfordshire – home to the UK’s Atomic Energy Authority and a stone’s throw away from some of the UK’s top tech firms such as Oxford Nanopore, Oxa and Oxford Instruments.

But where might the other zones be? The team at UKTN have identified three of the top candidates for the initiative.

If Keir Starmer is looking for a place to designate as an AI Growth Zone, he should certainly consider the North East. The region already has a burgeoning tech cluster in Newcastle and has significant growth potential. The UK’s second-largest tech company, enterprise software and fintech firm Sage, is already headquartered in the city while other top companies have significant bases there too.

The North East is not struggling for talent either. The region is home to some of the country’s top universities. Durham and the University of Newcastle both perform consistently highly on higher education league tables and produce waves of graduates each year.

Furthermore, data show that the region is becoming more populated with data centres—in the past five years, at least 11 new centres applied for planning permission. This includes a plan by asset management firm Blackstone to convert the disused Blyth power station into a £10bn data centre.

The 230-acre site will host ten data centre buildings, creating thousands of jobs and hugely increasing the region’s compute power, according to estimates made by Blackstone and Northumberland council.

As a historically deprived region of the UK, it has also been the recipient of ‘levelling up’ funding in recent years. In 2022 Liz Truss designated it as a trade and investment hub and pumped money into Country Durham’s NETPark, a science park which is home to a number of tech firms. But though Truss’ premiership was short-lived, the region’s potential for growth seems to have endured.

Wales already has clear ties with the development of AI. California-based Google landed its first big funding round in the late nineties courtesy of a $12.5m cheque handed to them by Cardiff-born investor Michael Moritz, who is now worth $6.8bn. And it was at Google in 2017 that another Welshman, Llion Jones, was among eight authors behind ‘Attention is All Your Need’, a seminal research paper that set the modern artificial intelligence craze in motion.

With a tech pedigree spanning decades and with plenty of room to grow, the city of Newport presents itself as one of the strongest candidates to become an AI Growth Zone in the future.

A two-hour train ride from London, the Welsh city’s renown as a centre for tech expertise stretches back to the early 1980s with the construction of a major microchip foundry by a semiconductor company then known as Inmos. It is now operated by US chipmaker Vishay after the firm acquired it in 2023 for just shy of $180m. The city is also home to a plant by British chipmaker IQE, the UK offices of KLA Corporation, which provides wafer processing solutions to semiconductors, and the Compound Semiconductor Applications Catapult, the UK’s authority on semiconductor applications.

An essential precondition of starting any major AI business is access to compute, and Newport has this in spades. The city is home to the Vantage data centre campus, one of the largest in both the UK and Europe which plans to expand capacity to over 200MW. And more are on the way. UKTN identified at least three separate planning applications for the construction of data centres in and around the city since 2020.

Even leaving aside the thousands employed in semiconductors, there’s plenty of tech talent around. More than one hundred tech and IT companies were founded in the city during 2024 alone, according to data from Companies House.

There are a handful of ingredients that will make a good AI Growth Zone. Proximity to major urban developments, a solid tech-literate workforce, pre-existing tech infrastructure and an appetite to grow.

And where better to name an AI Growth Zone than Buckinghamshire? A county which meets these criteria and just so happens to be home to one of UK science and technology’s most sacred sites, Bletchley Park.

In the Second World War Bletchley Park was the base of operations for one of Britain’s greatest mathematicians and computer scientists, Alan Turing. Jump forward a few decades and Bletchley became the host to presidents, ministers, tech billionaires and world-leading academics who came together in 2023 for the world’s first global summit on AI safety.

Nearby Milton Keynes was a city built to represent modernity and a technologically fuelled future of Britain, so why not allow it and the surrounding area to drive forward what the government claims will be a new era of AI-powered productivity and economic returns?

Buckinghamshire lies just a stone’s throw from London, has thousands of tech workers and, as per UKTN research, is one of the top counties in the UK for data centre planning applications over the past five years with 12 submissions.

Additional reporting by Oscar Hornstein