Pippa Lamb on the UK-US state visit: $30B Microsoft and Nvidia commitments, Revolut IPO watch, and UK as AI superpower

Let's go. And we have our first guest of the stream, our European correspondent, our UK correspondent. UK correspondent. [Music] I love this stuff. We actually should license that. We definitely are going to get demonetized for that. Great to see you. You know, it's my it's my favorite sound. I'm back in the studio.

Got the soundtrack going. It's such a banger song. It really is. Uh give us give us the weather report first. How was how was summer? How was uh uh was it Wimbledon? You went to some tennis event. What what did you do? I had I had a tennis Yeah, I had a good tennis summer. It was actually the US Open as well.

US Open recently. Is that the same as Wimbledon? Are they Are they the same thing? I mean, they're technically the same on like, you know, seniority, but I would say, you know, as a proud Brit that they are slightly different. Okay. Got it. Got it. Uh and then and then take us through uh this week.

What what what why are we paying attention to Europe? So I think you know the headline here I know that uh Jordi sort of said UK correspondent not U E European is that we've had this huge state visit this week from you know the White House delegation.

We also had a huge tech delegation come over which really sort of marks the first landmark second state visit that a US president has been given which President Trump likes to remind us lots of times.

So it's the first time that a US president hasn't been invited for a second ceremonial visit to to visit the royal family. So you had the sort of pageantry of this big white house delegation to Windsor Castle. Uh there was a big state banquet.

You had you know Jensen even taking off his black leather jacket and putting on his white tie which is you know one level up from black tie. You know, we get very horses here. I saw tons and tons of horses at there were a lot of horses. There was a lot of gold. We love gold as well.

So, so we really had one day which was you know a showcase of diplomacy and tradition and then you had a second day which was at checkers which is the UK prime minister's traditional sort of country home.

uh you know historical diplomacy is carried out there and the focus on that was not just you know UK trade and investment.

If you cast your mind back to May I think I was on the show we had the UK and the US come up with one of the first trade agreements which given the sort of the landscape of tariffs I think was a demonstration by the White House that they're really keen to make trade deals where they can.

So you had a continuation of that but the real focus this time was on tech and innovation across both uh energy and nuclear you had it across AI and quantum um and then also of course defense and and national security.

So that's why you not only had the delegation from the White House uh and a lot of, you know, key politicians, but you also had some of our our favorite tech CEOs from Silicon Valley making the trip over and and and putting on the white tie uh and also announcing a lot of investment.

Who were who were some of the the key names? Sam was there. So Jensen Jensen Beni off, right? But Palunteer and Roll as well. Yeah. Yeah.

So, so I guess the main companies you had Microsoft, so you had Satia there, you had Google, uh you had Nvidia, also Jensen was was extremely bullish on the UK and we'll maybe come back to that because he's he's sort of announced a multi-layered investment in the UK over multiple years.

You also had, you know, Karp here from Palunteer. Um you had Brian Shrimp Shrimp from Anderil. Um and yes, Sam Olman from OpenAI.

So it was really you know and there are a few others as well across uh you know Blackstone and and and Black Rockck you also had a lot of the large uh big farmer and healthcare companies you know GSK for example Glaco Smith's Klein has announced that it's going to be uh investing a lot into US R&D so it was really a big showing across you know major industries for investment on both sides of the Atlantic but there was a huge you know representation from Silicon Valley um and I mean just some of the numbers is are quite impressive.

So, so Microsoft announced that it's going to put $30 billion into the UK over the next four years. You had Google also committing around billion30 billion. So much. That's crazy. You had Google announcing they're going to put $7 billion into a data center that they've already established.

Um, but the the real number here that was impressive were was Nvidia. So, Jensen really wasn't just taking off the the black leather jacket for nothing.

He's uh put $670 billion into a UK cloud computing company uh called Nscale which is really designed to help AI um sort of the UK become an AI superpower as he called it.

So so that specifically is into uh to manufacturing and uh the infrastructure and then he's also potentially talking about putting $500 million into Wave uh which is the main autonomous vehicle uh company here in the UK. I don't know if you've heard Alex Kendall on TVPN.

He's an amazing founder, you know, brilliant, brilliant UK founder. So, so Jensen's really, I mean, he did a whole separate event where he met with Prime Minister Karma and really announced uh with a lot of enthusiasm uh such as the the Huang style that the UK is going to be a superpower. So, AI superpower.

H how should Americans be thinking about Kirst right now?

like where does he fit in in the left right continuum or there's a lot of countries that have uh leaders who are leaning more Trumpian in their style or leaning more focused on innovation or uh leading leaning less lawyerly more engineering focused like h how should people think about him who are who haven't uh do dove very deep yeah it's interesting so I think the first thing to know is that Kama came in on a landslide mandate similar to Trump earlier in the year.

So sorry, earlier in the year to Trump. So in the same way that you had a new leadership come into the US at the end of last year and then the inauguration earlier this year, the UK had a similar thing happen about 6 months before.

So Kama came in, you know, his party, the Labour party had been in opposition for a very long time. You'd had Boris Johnson and Conservatism for a long time. So it was a real big landslide change for the UK.

So what that means is similarly to the white house currently the UK prime minister has a pretty large mandate for change.

So even though you know when I was sitting in in the US at the end of last year there was some trepidation around the fact that you know the party is traditionally more leftleaning it's called the Labor Party. Um however um what you've actually seen is one a real ability to drive change.

So you know the number one thing is can you actually get legislation passed and number two and this was a sentiment echoed by quite a lot of tech CEOs yesterday was a real pragmatism to actually getting stuff done.

Now my personal view is that the UK after leaving the Europe European Union is now very much standing on its own. It's been able to you know reassert its relationship with the US. It's been able to carve out its own opinion on things like AI sovereignty. Um, it can be sort of pro- AI.

It doesn't get held back by some of the anti- or I should say more risk averse uh EU legislation, more cookie. Yeah, exactly. So even though traditionally you would you might think that the Labor Party is more left-leaning. Yeah. In the UK everything is going to be slightly more central central as well.

It's you know it's just a smaller country. Yeah.

Um, and so I think that you you're not going to see as as extremes, but you know, what I've been really, you know, happy to hear from a lot of the the CEOs I've spoken with is that there's this pragmatism to to getting stuff done and and being, you know, a pro a pro business open for business leadership uh within Europe.

Um what uh I feel like I feel like this is a new thing where uh like the entire like America is going on tour.

Like we saw this in the Middle East where it was like all of the tech CEOs and all the government people from the United States show up and they're like we're all doing deals today and then you see the Trump uh it's a little competition. Who's biggest deal? Yeah.

And and at the dinner it's like Mark Zuckerberg throws out a number and then Tim Cooks throws out a number and it feels like it was the same thing this uh this weekend this week. It was like that but with with Frillia outfits. You know Tim Cook was also there.

I mean um I'm going to I'm going to tweet an interesting list afterwards. But I highly recommend if you have some downtime just googling some of the images from from the last few days because they were really quite something. Yeah. uh you know the pageantry is is quite impressive on the UK uh nobody does it.

What are does it like the royal family? What are the top uh sort of like uh priorities just for the the British government right now in the US? I mean there's a lot of focus on on tariffs, immigration, the overall economy. The economy feels like uh running hot.

Everything's at all-time highs from gold to Bitcoin to the stock market. At the same time, we're seeing weakness in the labor market. Uh how are things feeling over in the UK broadly? I think the UK's main focus is on growth. There are definitely a lot of issues of course around immigration.

Um I think some of the you know highlighted issues on places like X have have kind of showed that there are a lot of uh I guess questions around immigration policy across Europe at the moment. UK is definitely part of that.

Um I think you know from my perspective a lot of the focus is really trying to d drive a pro tech prog growth uh environment. I think that traditionally a lot of the growth in the UK has come from the city.

So traditional you know big finance players it was a real hub for for financial services and I think that there's a recognition that the UK is actually if you look at it a really big hub for R&D. You know you've had um you know Google DeepMind originated in the UK.

You've had a lot of advances in uh both synthetic bio and big pharma come out the UK. You know hubs not just in London but you know real R&D centers like Oxford and Cambridge have have really been leading for a long time. You've got the big semis company ARM based in the UK.

So in the last few years I think you've really seen uh governments on both sides of the aisle try and move away from like purely financial driven growth uh into uh you know tech and and R&D.

So that's something that I think the White House and and 10 Downing Street are really aligned on and you know this is obviously was a big sort of PR uh campaign to also show that the the special relationship as we call it um goes both ways and uh and I think you know something that was significant a lot of people have said to me okay what's in it for the US you know we're obviously investing a lot of money into the UK but I think that if you look at how the US thinks about exporting its own AI data stack across the world and you you put that against some of the competition with you know the Far East and and China.

This was a really good opportunity for the US to kind of reassert its position as the dominant AI player and you know they signed a really interesting memorandum. It was called the tech pro P prosperity deal. Lovely namesperity. Exactly.

which basically allows the US to align on you know how data models are built and and some of the kind of you know very core things that the US cares about in terms of you know ensuring that the data stack is defined by the US and not by someone else.

Take us through an update on the private markets in Europe broadly in the UK. Uh who are folks focused on at the growth stage? We were at the uh New York Stock Exchange. Was that last week? I keep losing track of time, but CLA IPOed successfully. Stock trade. How was how was the mood?

I mean, it was uh it's obviously continued to hold up pretty well. Um yeah, the mood was good for it was it was our takeaway was kind of interesting with uh with the CEO is that uh it was just another day for him. He didn't bring his family. He just came, raised some money, got in, got out. It was a fundraiser.

It was a fundraiser. Whereas with Figma, it was this huge moment because a lot of folks in Brooklyn use Figma in Manhattan use Figma. And so it's an American company. They really focused on the story of Dylan.

Uh and with Sebastian over at Clarna, it was it was it wasn't as much of like everyone is a partner in this ecosystem. Um but in general, it felt like a really good moment. People had been waiting for Clara to go out for a long time and it was great to see them get out successfully.

But uh who else is driving this the the the the market or the news? Yeah. Do you expect any type of spinouts from Deep Mind as well into like more like application layer companies or do you feel like the researchers there are just going to be content to you know double down?

So I think just on on that front um as well as you mentioned I think both Dylan and Sebastian amazing founders really exciting that we're seeing the IPO market off to off to a good start at the moment and you know I think although StubHub I think StubHub is down.

StubHub had a hard had a hard time from uh listing price yesterday. So it's okay. Okay. Well, we'll get it all back in the next one. But I think that you know in terms of names to watch here the big elephant in the room for a long time has been Revolute.

So for those not familiar in the US market, Revolute is really the largest fintech player here uh in the UK. Um its last valuation I think was around $70 billion. The last employee I think that was a secondary. So that's really been the main question.

um some of the news stories around that have been around it, you know, banking license over the years and and whether they were going to, you know, go for an IPO.

I think that one, you know, continue to watch on and and if you look at Jensen's comments even on this trip, he's even said that, you know, Nvidia may also invest in in in Revolute. So, I think Jensen is really he's really keen on the UK. We love we love Jensen. He's pumping everything. It's great.

I think in terms of of Google Deep Mind, um I'm unclear if they're going to be, you know, spinouts, I think that uh you know, the UK government has always looked at Deep Mind as an example of UK companies that really should have been able to stay and prosper in the UK or within Europe.

And so I think that you're going to continue to see a lot of focus on you know UK's own AI infrastructure um the energy stack that's required for that. So we also had quite a lot of announcements around nuclear um this week because of course the energy uh question is a big one for the UK.

Interestingly, actually, one of the other things the White House got out of this week's negotiations was that there is a commitment to the UK from being completely um unreliant on um on any any Russian nuclear um energy as well.

So I think that you know you're really seeing both the UK shore up its its energy stack um and I think a lot of that is to do with the fact that UK really wants to try and you know make itself um a great hub for for AI talent whether that be through Google Deep Mind or or some of the other really exciting companies like Wave.

Yeah. Uh makes sense.

As extra context, in 2021, Demis Hibbus over at DeepMind co-founded Isomorphic Labs, which is a a spin out, but still uh I believe private and owned by Alphabet and Deep Mind and they're focused Yeah, I meant companies owned that type of And he's still based in the UK, which you know, the prime minister always likes to point out, but he's still working with with Satia, so with Google.

Yeah. With Yeah. Well, thank you so much for hopping on the show. Always great to get that. Always great to hang out with you. Always fun to chat with you guys. We'll talk to you soon, Pippa. Cheers. Bye. Hopefully, we can have a new tennis tournament sometime soon. So, Pepa comes back to the US.

Like, seems like that's what that's what gets her over here. Should we talk about Vant automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously? Vantage trust management platform takes your manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with