LONDON — Amazon Web Services (AWS), the U.S. e-commerce giant’s cloud division, announced plans to invest £8 billion ($10.45 billion) over the next five years to build and operate data centers in the U.K. as it ramps up its cloud computing efforts in the country.

The investment, announced early Wednesday London time, comes as cloud players talk up the benefits of generative artificial intelligence (AI) and as companies look to integrate the tech into their businesses.

“We’ve seen a real uptake of cloud computing and AI technology by British businesses, and we know the U.K. has a very ambitious digital plan,” Tanuja Randery, managing director for European, Middle East and Africa at AWS, told CNBC in an interview.

“So this will go toward helping our customers to really be able to harness cloud computing, because you need the data centers to be able to actually provide cloud computing for our customers.”

Randery said generative AI is “probably the most transformative technology we have seen, possibly since the cloud and the internet” and that businesses are currently trialing the nascent tech.

“We’ve also seen that businesses are looking at this in terms of both revenue growth, employee productivity, which is really, really critical, as you know, but also being able to compete globally.”

AWS, along with other cloud players, has been investing heavily in infrastructure, such as data centers and Nvidia chips, in order to train and run AI models. These cloud players then sell AI services to businesses.

AWS competes with Microsoft and Google in the U.K. and its investment continues the company’s focus on expansion in Europe. AWS said this year it plans to invest 8.8 billion euros in existing cloud infrastructure in Germany.

But this investment also comes at a time when regulators in the U.K. are scrutinizing competition in the cloud market with AWS and Microsoft under the microscope. The Competitions and Markets Authority is currently looking into the the U.K. cloud market.

Randery said AWS is “working very constructively” with the CMA but that authorities need to balance regulation and innovation.

“We worked very closely with governments and regulators around the world, we believe that it’s important to have regulation, but that regulation should continue to be innovation friendly,” Randery told CNBC.

AI-powered search startup Glean said Tuesday it has raised $260 million in a funding round that values the tech company at $4.6 billion — more than double its last reported valuation. The Palo Alto, California-based firm, ranked No. 43 on this year’s CNBC Disruptor 50 list, has now raised more than $600 million to date from more than 20 investors.

Glean competes with a herd of well-financed generative AI startups and tech giants, attempting to compete with Microsoft Copilot and chatbot Amazon Q. It also aims to disrupt a field of cognitive search tool providers such as Perplexity, Coveo, Sinequa and LucidWork.  

Glean’s Series E round, led by Altimeter and DST Global, includes Craft Ventures, Sapphire Ventures, and SoftBank Vision Fund 2, all new investors in the company.

Existing investors in the round include Coatue, General Catalyst, ICONIQ Growth, IVP, Kleiner Perkins, Latitude Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Sequoia Capital.

Founder and CEO Arvind Jain started Glean in 2019 with other former Google engineers as an enterprise search engine. The company soon transitioned to generative AI. Jain has described Glean as Google and ChatGPT for businesses. It offers conversational AI to sort through internal data, retrieve information, and present quick answers. Jain is also a founder of Rubrik, which had a successful IPO in April.

“Businesses today are in the midst of an AI transformation — one that promises to be as big or bigger than the internet, mobile, cloud, and other major technology shifts of the past century,” Jain said in a blog post announcing the latest round.

Global enterprise spending on generative AI is projected to rocket from $16 billion in 2023 to $143 billion in 2027 and account for 28% of AI expenditures, according to tech research and advisory firm IDC.

In a breakout year for AI funding, startups in that industry saw five times the level of investment as the previous year. As many as 36 generative AI startups have become unicorns, according to CB Insights, as valuations surged and corporate investors Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and Google led the march.

CAMBRIDGE, England — The U.K. is doing a bad job of commercializing technology businesses globally and needs a mindset shift from the investor community to win on the world stage, a former CEO of British chip design firm Arm said Tuesday.

In a keynote speech at Cambridge Tech Week, Warren East, who led Arm between 1994 and 2013, said that there have been criticisms that lackluster growth and poor rates of GDP per head in the U.K. are a source of national “embarrassment.”

He added that too often firms that achieve scale in Britain have a tendency to change locations from the U.K. or list abroad in countries such as the U.S., due to difficulties with achieving global relevance from the country.

“I think we have a lot to offer in terms of U.K.-based innovative technology,” East told the audience at Cambridge Tech Week. However, he added: “We tend not to be able to realise as many global businesses as that promise would suggest.”

East was also previously the CEO of U.K. aviation engineering giant Rolls-Royce. He is currently a non-executive director on the board of Tokamak Energy.

East said that Britain “needs to get commercialization right,” adding that too much innovation gets created in the U.K. but is then exported elsewhere around the world.

There is “sadly a common story of all the wonderful stuff that gets made in Britain and then gets commercialized and exploited elsewhere,” East said. He added that he doesn’t have a “silver bullet” solution on how to fix the issue, but suggested that the U.K. needs to encourage more “risk appetite” to support high-growth tech firms.

“We’re often told that the problem isn’t the startup bit, it’s the scale up bit,” East said, explaining that there are far deeper pools of capital presence in the U.S. “Investor risk appetite in the U.S. is higher than it is in the U.K.,” he said

East noted that there have been pushes among the British entrepreneurial community and VCs for a change to capital market rules that will allow more investments from pension funds into startups and “stimulate risk appetite” in the U.K.

“Fortunately I think we can expect more of that over the coming years,” East told attendees of the Cambridge event. However, he added: “Businesses can’t guarantee that’s going to happen, and can’t wait for the rules to change.”

Last year, Arm, whose chip architectures can be found in most of the world’s smartphone processors, listed on the Nasdaq in the U.S. in a major blow to U.K. officials and the London Stock Exchange’s ambitions to hold more tech debuts in Britain.

The company remains majority-owned by Japanese tech giant SoftBank.