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LONDON — The U.K. says it wants to do its “own thing” when it comes to regulating artificial intelligence, hinting at a possible divergence from approaches taken by its main Western peers.

“It’s really important that we as the U.K. do our own thing when it comes to regulation,” Feryal Clark, Britain’s minister for AI and digital government, told CNBC in an interview that aired Tuesday.

She added the government already has a “good relationship” with AI companies like OpenAI and Google DeepMind, which have voluntarily opened their models up to the government for safety testing purposes.

“It’s really important that we bake in that safety right at the beginning when models are being developed … and that’s why we’ll be working with the sector on any safety measures that come forward,” Clark added.

UK can do its 'own thing' on AI regulation, minister says

Her comments echoed remarks from Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Monday that Britain has “freedom now in relation to the regulation to do it in a way that we think is best for the U.K.” after Brexit.

 “You’ve got different models around the world, you’ve got the EU approach and the U.S. approach – but we have the ability to choose the one that we think is in our best interest and we intend to do so,” Starmer said in response to a reporter’s question after announcing a 50-point plan to make the U.K. a global leader in AI.

Divergence from the U.S., EU

However, so far, the U.K. is yet to confirm details on proposed AI safety legislation, instead saying it will consult with the industry before proposing formal rules.

“We will be working with the sector to develop that and bring that forward in line with what we said in our manifesto,” Clark told CNBC.

Chris Mooney, partner and head of commercial at London-based law firm Marriott Harrison, told CNBC that the U.K. is taking a “wait and see” approach to AI regulation even as the EU is forging ahead with its AI Act.

“While the U.K. government says it has taken a ‘pro-innovation’ approach to AI regulation, our experience of working with clients is that they find the current position uncertain and, therefore, unsatisfactory,” Mooney told CNBC via email.

One area Starmer’s government has spoken up on reforming rules for AI has been around copyright.

Late last year, the U.K. opened a consultation reviewing the country’s copyright framework to assess possible exceptions to existing rules for AI developers using artists and media publishers’ works to train their models.

Businesses left uncertain

Sachin Dev Duggal, CEO of London-headquartered AI startup Builder.ai, told CNBC that, although the government’s AI action plan “shows ambition,” proceeding without clear rules is “borderline reckless.”

“We’ve already missed crucial regulatory windows twice — first with cloud computing and then with social media,” Duggal said. “We cannot afford to make the same mistake with AI, where the stakes are exponentially higher.”

“The U.K.’s data is our crown jewel; it should be leveraged to build sovereign AI capabilities and create British success stories, not simply fuel overseas algorithms that we can’t effectively regulate or control,” he added.

Details of Labour’s plans for AI legislation were initially expected to appear in King Charles III’s speech opening U.K. Parliament last year.

However, the government only committed to establishing “appropriate legislation” on the most powerful AI models.

“The U.K. government needs to provide clarity here,” John Buyers, international head of AI at law firm Osborne Clarke, told CNBC, adding he’s learned from sources that a consultation for formal AI safety laws is “waiting to be released.”

“By issuing consultations and plans on a piecemeal basis, the U.K. has missed the opportunity to provide a holistic view of where its AI economy is heading,” he said, adding that failure to disclose details of new AI safety laws would lead to investor uncertainty.

Still, some figures in the U.K. tech scene think that a more relaxed, flexible approach to regulating AI may be the right one.

“From recent discussions with the government, it is clear that considerable efforts are underway on AI safeguards,” Russ Shaw, founder of advocacy group Tech London Advocates, told CNBC.

He added that the U.K is well positioned to adopt a “third way” on AI safety and regulation — “sector-specific” regulations that rules to different industries like financial services and health care.

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Musk says Tesla is expanding Austin robotaxi service, adding Grok to cars

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Musk says Tesla is expanding Austin robotaxi service, adding Grok to cars

Tesla CEO Elon Musk attends an opening ceremony for Tesla China-made Model Y program in Shanghai, China, on Jan. 7, 2020.

Aly Song | Reuters

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the company is expanding its robotaxi service area and bringing xAI’s Grok to vehicles as it rolled out a new iteration of the artificial intelligence chatbot.

Shares gained about 3%.

Musk said on X that Grok, his AI chatbot that praised Adolf Hitler and posted a barrage of antisemitic comments recently, will be available in Tesla vehicles “next week at the latest.”

xAI officially launched the Grok 4 update overnight as the company continued to face backlash for the vitriol written by the chatbot.

In response to a user post on his social media platform X, Musk said the company is expanding its Austin, Texas robotaxi service area this weekend. He also said Tesla is awaiting regulatory approval for a launch in the Bay Area “probably in a month or two.”

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The expansion of robotaxi and Grok integration comes at a fraught time for Musk and his empire.

Tesla set its annual shareholder meeting for Nov. 6, a Thursday filing showed. A group of investors recently called on the electric vehicle company to schedule the meeting.

Its last shareholder meeting was in June 2024, as Musk established himself as a major backer of President Donald Trump‘s reelection campaign. Musk later led the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE.

After stepping down from DOGE at the end of May, Musk has openly feuded with Trump on social media over the major tax bill, with the president suggesting the government look at cutting contracts for Musk’s companies.

Shares have tanked from their post-election high over investor concerns that the public fight could hamper Tesla. Slowing sales and rising competition also stifled some investor appetite.

Tesla shares fell Monday, with the company losing $68 billion in value after Musk continued to blast Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” and said he was establishing his own political party, the “America Party.”

The world’s richest man suffered another blow Wednesday when Linda Yaccarino stepped down as CEO of his social media platform X, leaving the role after a turbulent two years for the company.

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Amazon Web Services is building equipment to cool Nvidia GPUs as AI boom accelerates

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Amazon Web Services is building equipment to cool Nvidia GPUs as AI boom accelerates

The letters AI, which stands for “artificial intelligence,” stand at the Amazon Web Services booth at the Hannover Messe industrial trade fair in Hannover, Germany, on March 31, 2025.

Julian Stratenschulte | Picture Alliance | Getty Images

Amazon said Wednesday that its cloud division has developed hardware to cool down next-generation Nvidia graphics processing units that are used for artificial intelligence workloads.

Nvidia’s GPUs, which have powered the generative AI boom, require massive amounts of energy. That means companies using the processors need additional equipment to cool them down.

Amazon considered erecting data centers that could accommodate widespread liquid cooling to make the most of these power-hungry Nvidia GPUs. But that process would have taken too long, and commercially available equipment wouldn’t have worked, Dave Brown, vice president of compute and machine learning services at Amazon Web Services, said in a video posted to YouTube.

“They would take up too much data center floor space or increase water usage substantially,” Brown said. “And while some of these solutions could work for lower volumes at other providers, they simply wouldn’t be enough liquid-cooling capacity to support our scale.”

Rather, Amazon engineers conceived of the In-Row Heat Exchanger, or IRHX, that can be plugged into existing and new data centers. More traditional air cooling was sufficient for previous generations of Nvidia chips.

Customers can now access the AWS service as computing instances that go by the name P6e, Brown wrote in a blog post. The new systems accompany Nvidia’s design for dense computing power. Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 packs a single rack with 72 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs that are wired together to train and run large AI models.

Computing clusters based on Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 have previously been available through Microsoft or CoreWeave. AWS is the world’s largest supplier of cloud infrastructure.

Amazon has rolled out its own infrastructure hardware in the past. The company has custom chips for general-purpose computing and for AI, and designed its own storage servers and networking routers. In running homegrown hardware, Amazon depends less on third-party suppliers, which can benefit the company’s bottom line. In the first quarter, AWS delivered the widest operating margin since at least 2014, and the unit is responsible for most of Amazon’s net income.

Microsoft, the second largest cloud provider, has followed Amazon’s lead and made strides in chip development. In 2023, the company designed its own systems called Sidekicks to cool the Maia AI chips it developed.

WATCH: AWS announces latest CPU chip, will deliver record networking speed

AWS announces latest CPU chip, will deliver record networking speed

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Bitcoin rises to fresh record above $112,000, helped by Nvidia-led tech rally

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Bitcoin rises to fresh record above 2,000, helped by Nvidia-led tech rally

The logo of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin can be seen on a coin in front of a Bitcoin chart.

Silas Stein | Picture Alliance | Getty Images

Bitcoin hit a fresh record on Wednesday afternoon as an Nvidia-led rally in equities helped push the price of the cryptocurrency higher into the stock market close.

The price of bitcoin was last up 1.9%, trading at $110,947.49, according to Coin Metrics. Just before 4:00 p.m. ET, it hit a high of $112,052.24, surpassing its May 22 record of $111,999.

The flagship cryptocurrency has been trading in a tight range for several weeks despite billions of dollars flowing into bitcoin exchange traded funds. Bitcoin purchases by public companies outpaced ETF inflows in the second quarter. Still, bitcoin is up just 2% in the past month.

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Bitcoin climbs above $112,000

On Wednesday, tech stocks rallied as Nvidia became the first company to briefly touch $4 trillion in market capitalization. In the same session, investors appeared to shrug off the latest tariff developments from President Donald Trump. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite notched a record close.

While institutions broadly have embraced bitcoin’s “digital gold” narrative, it is still a risk asset that rises and falls alongside stocks depending on what’s driving investor sentiment. When the market is in risk-on mode and investors buy growth-oriented assets like tech stocks, bitcoin and crypto tend to rally with them.

Investors have been expecting bitcoin to reach new records in the second half of the year as corporate treasuries accelerate their bitcoin buying sprees and Congress gets closer to passing crypto legislation.

Don’t miss these cryptocurrency insights from CNBC Pro:

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