Alphabet’s president and chief investment officer Ruth Porat has set out a fresh push in Britain, announcing £5 billion in new UK spending and the opening of Google’s Waltham Cross data centre just outside London.
The plan lands hours before U.S. President Donald Trump’s state visit, and is projected to support roughly 8,250 UK jobs a year across suppliers and related activity. UK finance minister Rachel Reeves hailed the move as “a powerful vote of confidence” in Britain.
The package also slots into a broader economic backdrop for the trip: U.S. officials say more than $10 billion in U.S.–UK business deals are set to be unveiled during the visit. That raises the stakes for London’s tech and energy agenda as both governments court private capital.
Porat’s hand is visible in the framing. Since moving from CFO to president & CIO in 2023, she has overseen Alphabet’s infrastructure and investment units. At Davos in January, she told an audience that there is “a tremendous amount of opportunity” to work with the Trump administration, signalling Google’s appetite for policy that speeds up permits and large-scale build-outs.
Waltham Cross is built to serve compute-hungry AI workloads across Google Cloud, Search, Maps and Workspace. Google says the site uses air-cooling to reduce water use, can recycle waste heat to nearby homes or businesses, and aims for ~95% carbon-free energy in 2026 across its UK operations. This is backed by a partnership with Shell for grid-stability services.
Today’s move builds on Google’s earlier $1 billion commitment to the same site announced in 2024, and on a long UK footprint that spans offices and subsea connectivity. In January 2024, Google said it had begun building the Waltham Cross facility on a 33-acre plot. And in 2021, Google’s Grace Hopper subsea cable landed in Cornwall, linking New York to Bude and Bilbao to boost network resilience for users and enterprise clients.
The investment gives Britain a high-profile win on jobs, grid reliability and AI infrastructure as Trump’s delegation arrives for meetings with the King and with Prime Minister Keir Starmer. U.S. officials trail a slate of cross-border deals during the visit, sharpening the focus on energy security and compute capacity that data-centre operators say they need to scale AI services.