Business

Nvidia has fired its loudest shot yet at the personal computing market, unveiling a new superchip that chief executive Jensen Huang says will turn the humble Windows PC into a “teammate” capable of running personal artificial intelligence agents.

Speaking on Monday at a keynote ahead of the Computex technology show in Taipei, Mr Huang likened the moment to the arrival of the smartphone. “This reinvention of the computer is as big of a deal as the reinvention of the phone into what we now know as the smartphone,” he told delegates as he lifted the lid on the RTX Spark.

The chip, which Nvidia describes as a “superchip for the era of personal AI agents”, will sit at the heart of a new generation of Windows machines from Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft Surface and MSI when they reach shelves this autumn. Acer and Gigabyte are expected to follow with their own models shortly afterwards. According to Nvidia’s own briefing notes, Spark pairs a Blackwell GPU with an Arm CPU and up to 128GB of unified memory, delivering roughly one petaflop of AI performance on the desk.

For Britain’s small and medium-sized businesses, the implications are significant. On-device AI promises to run drafting, scheduling, customer-service triage and basic analytics without sending sensitive data into the cloud, a development that chimes with the productivity story Business Matters has been tracking in our recent coverage of small businesses embracing AI for quick productivity wins. It also raises the bar for the next hardware refresh, with finance directors now needing to weigh AI-capable specifications alongside the usual considerations of price and support.

The move puts Nvidia squarely in the path of Apple and Intel in a consumer PC market that has been searching for a story to tell since the post-pandemic slump. With an estimated stock-market value north of $5 trillion (£3.7 trillion), a milestone first reported in detail by CNN Business, Nvidia has both the firepower and the brand recognition to disrupt the established order on the high street as well as in the data centre.

The announcement was not without geopolitical noise. On Sunday, the US Department of Commerce moved to close a loophole that had allowed the most advanced Nvidia hardware, including its Blackwell processors, to reach subsidiaries of Chinese firms operating outside the mainland. Washington’s broader campaign to keep cutting-edge silicon out of Chinese hands has been a recurring drag on Nvidia’s growth narrative, even as demand elsewhere remains ferocious.

For UK owner-managers, the strategic question is no longer whether AI belongs in the workplace, but where it should live. As we noted in our analysis of why AI and green tech are vital to SME growth, the businesses that move first on practical, on-the-ground deployment tend to widen the gap on those that wait. That trend is already showing up in the lending figures, with our recent report on UK SME lending climbing to £17.5bn on the back of AI-led growth suggesting balance sheets are being shaped around the technology, not the other way round. Spark, if it delivers on Mr Huang’s billing, may finally make the case for putting that intelligence on the desk rather than in the cloud.

Whether it really represents a “smartphone moment” will depend less on the silicon and more on the software that ships with it. But after a decade in which the PC has felt increasingly like a commodity, Nvidia has at least given the industry something fresh to argue about.

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Nvidia takes the AI war to the desktop with RTX Spark superchip

Whitehall has turned to one of the City’s most seasoned retail chiefs in an attempt to head off what ministers are now privately describing as the most acute youth unemployment crisis in more than a decade.

Marc Bolland, the former chief executive of Marks & Spencer, has been drafted in by the government to corral Britain’s biggest employers behind a renewed push to get young people into work, following an excoriating review by the former Labour cabinet minister Alan Milburn that warned the country risked sacrificing a generation to worklessness.

Milburn’s interim report, published this week, found that one in six 16- to 24-year-olds will be out of work, education or training within five years unless ministers act decisively. The figure currently stands at one in eight. Official data has already pushed the cohort of so-called NEETs above the one-million mark, the highest level in more than 12 years, and Milburn warned of a “generational fault line” opening up beneath the labour market.

“The problem is that for too many young people, opportunities are not growing, they’re shrinking,” Milburn wrote. His review found that six in ten NEETs have never held a job, yet 84 per cent of those surveyed said they wanted to work or train, a finding that has galvanised support inside Number 11 for a more interventionist approach.

Bolland, who also ran Morrisons and served as chief operating officer at Heineken, will report to Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden and take up the role of Lead Non-Executive Director at the Department for Work and Pensions. His brief, confirmed by the government, is to convene chief executives across sectors and to advise ministers on how to respond to Milburn’s findings.

It is familiar territory. In 2012, in the wake of the previous summer’s riots, Bolland founded Movement to Work, the employer-led charity that has since helped more than 200,000 disadvantaged young people into employment. That track record, built on persuading rival boardrooms to pool resources rather than wait for state schemes, is precisely what ministers hope he can replicate at scale.

“I believe the government is serious about tackling this generational crisis of youth unemployment,” Bolland said on his appointment, “and I know that working hand-in-hand with business to support young people gives them the best possible chance of success.”

Alongside Bolland’s appointment, the government has secured commitments from some of the UK’s largest employers to back 300,000 work experience and training placements over the next three years. McDonald’s was first off the blocks earlier this year with 2,500 paid work experience placements, and Whitehall is now banking on a long tail of mid-market and SME employers following suit.

The push dovetails with the Treasury’s £725m package of apprenticeship reforms, which is expected to create 50,000 new roles and introduce shorter, more flexible training routes from April. Together, the measures represent the most concerted attempt to rebuild the rungs of the working ladder since the Coalition’s apprenticeship drive of the early 2010s.

Whether it works will depend in no small part on whether Bolland can persuade boardrooms that the cost of a placement now is cheaper than the cost of a hollowed-out talent pipeline later. As Milburn put it in his own assessment of the review’s findings, for every £1 the state spent on employment support for young people in 2024/25, roughly £25 went on benefits. That, more than any speech from the Despatch Box, is the number business will be asked to help shift.

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Bolland called in as Milburn review warns of a “lost generation” of British youth

Roughly nine in ten companies are yet to see a penny of financial benefit from artificial intelligence, despite a threefold rise in workplace usage over the past two years, according to the head of the world’s largest consulting firm in Britain and Ireland.

Matt Prebble, chief executive of Accenture UK and Ireland, said the disconnect between enthusiastic adoption and measurable returns now ranks as one of the most pressing strategic questions facing boardrooms on both sides of the Atlantic.

“Over the last two years, we’ve seen three times as many people using AI within the workplace, but that individual productivity … that’s not actually yet translating to real company performance,” he said. His verdict echoes fresh Accenture research showing that only one in ten UK organisations has successfully scaled the technology into core operations.

According to Prebble, the failure to extract value has its roots in companies treating AI as a bolt-on rather than reshaping the way they work “across people, process and technology”.

“We found that one in ten companies are really starting to get the productivity flow through to the bottom line, but on the other hand, 90 per cent of companies aren’t,” he said. He remained confident, however, that AI would yet have a “material impact” on businesses prepared to display the “confidence and the willingness to reinvent” how they operate, with the technology at the centre of the redesign.

His warning lands at a moment when chief executives and chief financial officers are sharpening their pencils over AI budgets. Businesses are increasingly questioning whether the sums they are pouring into AI tokens, the basic units used by large language models to read, remember and generate content, are delivering a defensible return. The growing scepticism mirrors a wider pattern of stalling adoption at large enterprises as doubts mount over AI returns.

Andrew Macdonald, chief operating officer at Uber, conceded last week that the ride-hailing and delivery group had yet to observe any direct productivity uplift tied to its rising AI token consumption. “That link is not there yet, right?” he said. By March, Uber had burned through its annual budget for “agentic”, or autonomous, AI, with the link between greater token spend and useful consumer features still unconvincing.

Microsoft has reportedly told some of its staff to switch to its own in-house model rather than third-party alternatives, in an effort to rein in costs. According to Axios, one unnamed company spent $500 million in a single month on Anthropic’s Claude platform after leaving employee usage uncapped.

The mounting cost pressure has emboldened critics of the sector’s hyper-investment cycle. A widely cited MIT study reported by Fortune found that 95 per cent of corporate generative AI pilots were failing to produce measurable returns, prompting renewed warnings of a possible correction in the valuations and business models of the industry’s leading players.

Cultural headwinds are building too. Pope Leo has criticised the AI industry and called for tighter regulation, while graduates at several US college campuses have booed speakers championing the technology. Prebble acknowledged that AI was suffering from “a bit of a brand issue” in the West, “very different to Asia”, with anxiety over job losses and the pace of change clouding the picture.

“You have seen leaders in the market talking around the job dislocation and giving headlines around the impact on early graduate or next graduate jobs, which I think has created some of the fear out there,” he said.

He insisted, however, that equating greater AI adoption with fewer overall jobs reflected a “narrow view” of productivity. “The further we go in this cycle … things will be done differently. And therefore there’ll be different skills and different capabilities required,” he added. “There’s always been those waves of technological change that have come and it is true that it’s always created new job opportunities and over time, those job opportunities have outpaced the previous job.”

For all the gloom over returns, Prebble argued that Britain still has time to turn AI into a national growth story. The UK may have largely missed out on the spoils of building AI infrastructure, but he believes there is a credible path to capitalise on the application layer by playing to British strengths in life sciences and professional services. That view aligns with separate HSBC research suggesting AI adoption could unlock a £105bn revenue boost for UK mid-sized firms by 2030.

“If we can get our innovation swagger back to be able to then scale that across the country and globally, we’ve got some good opportunities,” Prebble said.

Accenture has begun rebranding its 800,000-strong workforce as “reinventors”, a label Prebble said reflects the group’s growing remit advising clients on how to overhaul their operating models for the AI era. Last year the consulting giant restructured its own business, folding strategy, consulting, creative, technology and operations into a single division dubbed “reinvention services”. Earlier this year, reports emerged that the Dublin-based firm had been monitoring how its own staff used AI tools as a factor in promotion decisions.

For now, though, the message from the boss of Britain’s largest professional services consulting brand is blunt: the productivity revolution promised by AI is still, for the vast majority of UK plc, a promise rather than a payslip.

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Nine in ten companies still waiting for AI to pay off, warns Accenture chief

Richard Desmond’s Northern & Shell has been left nursing a costs bill expected to top £40 million after a High Court judge tore into the media tycoon’s two-year campaign against the Gambling Commission, branding its case for £1.3 billion in damages “fanciful”.

In a punishing blow to the 73-year-old entrepreneur, Mrs Justice Joanna Smith ordered Northern & Shell and its subsidiary, the New Lottery Company, to pay costs on the indemnity basis, a punitive measure typically reserved for litigants whose conduct the court considers unreasonable. The judge further directed that 75 per cent of the bill be paid up front, denying Desmond’s camp the breathing space of a full appeal process before writing the cheque.

The ruling marks a humbling end to what was billed in court as the legal fallout from “the most financially significant procurement process in UK history” — the award of the fourth National Lottery licence, valued at £70 billion over a decade.

The anatomy of a defeat

Northern & Shell’s twin-track challenge attacked both the Gambling Commission’s scoring of its bid as a “fail” and the lawfulness of post-award modifications to the contract handed to Czech-owned Allwyn Entertainment, the eventual winner. Neither argument survived contact with the courtroom.

Smith found that the commission had been entirely right to disqualify Desmond’s bid, which had failed more than half of the 23 mandatory requirements the regulator had set. The judge highlighted an “enormous gap” of more than 30 points between Northern & Shell’s aggregate score and Allwyn’s, describing the Czech operator, controlled by billionaire Karel Komárek, as the “world leader in conducting lotteries”.

In dismissing the £1.3 billion damages claim outright, the judge concluded it was “fanciful to suppose” Desmond’s vehicle would have won any fair competition against Allwyn. The commission’s subsequent modifications to the licence were also held to be lawful, a finding that closes off the secondary route Northern & Shell had attempted to keep alive after dropping part of its claim on the eve of trial.

A bill that keeps growing

The Gambling Commission’s own legal costs are understood to have reached around £22 million, broadly in line with the £28.8 million the regulator had already disclosed in its mounting defence budget for the case. On top of that, Desmond’s company is liable for Allwyn’s legal fees and its own counsel, pushing the all-in figure comfortably past £40 million.

For a privately held group whose flagship asset is now the Health Lottery, launched in 2011, that is no trivial sum. Northern & Shell most recently reported around £20.8 million in cash reserves, while the New Lottery Company itself sat on a pre-tax loss. The interim payment alone could force a recalibration of group finances.

A founder running out of road

Desmond made his name in adult magazines before moving into adult television and, in 2010, the acquisition of Channel 5. He has since exited those interests along with Express Newspapers, leaving the Health Lottery and the failed bid for the National Lottery as the centre of gravity for his media-to-gaming empire.

The High Court ruling, published in full on the Courts and Tribunals Judiciary website, forms part of a wider pattern: the original April defeat on the substantive claim left little room for the costs hearing to deliver anything other than further pain. Northern & Shell has signalled an appetite to appeal, but the indemnity costs order suggests the bench took a dim view of how the proceedings were run.

What the regulator says

A spokeswoman for the Gambling Commission, which welcomed the ruling in a public statement, said the costs award would “lessen the potential impact of the litigation on good causes” — a pointed reminder that every pound spent defending the licence is a pound not reaching the charities and community projects the lottery is designed to fund.

Lawyers for the commission noted the order remained open to appeal, but called the interim payment a “significant milestone” that effectively closes this chapter of the dispute. A written judgment from Smith, expected within weeks, will set out in detail why she considered indemnity costs appropriate, and is likely to make uncomfortable reading for the Desmond camp.

Northern & Shell has been contacted for comment.

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Desmond’s Northern & Shell faces £40m bill after ‘fanciful’ lottery claim collapses

Backed by the National Wealth Fund, the British Business Bank and M&G, Pragmatic Semiconductor is using a modular, low-capital model to scale flexible chip production at a pace Asia and the US would struggle to match.

On the Meadowfield industrial estate outside Durham, a 55,000 sq ft warehouse that spent a decade gathering dust, and the droppings of nesting seagulls, has been transformed into one of the more intriguing bets in British manufacturing. The gulls have been seen off by a hawk called Buzz; the drains have been cleared; and inside what was once a PVC piping factory, the UK’s most ambitious volume chipmaker is now in full production.

Pragmatic Semiconductor is twelve months into shipping its first commercial orders, the culmination of 14 years of work that began as a Cambridge science project. By year-end, the company expects billions of its ultra-thin, 300mm flexible chips to be leaving the Durham site bound for customers in pharmaceuticals, consumer electronics and fast-moving consumer goods. At that point, management believes Pragmatic will be the UK’s largest semiconductor manufacturer by volume.

The timing is pointed. The European Commission is this week expected to publish a refreshed Chips Act, the latest leg of Brussels’ attempt to wean the bloc off American and Asian silicon by backing home-grown semiconductor capacity. Westminster, too, has put domestic chipmaking near the top of its modern industrial strategy, with advanced manufacturing earmarked as a sector in which Britain has what ministers call a “genuine right to win”.

A different kind of chip, and a different kind of fab

Pragmatic’s edge is that it does not play the same game as TSMC, Samsung or Intel. Its proprietary thin-film transistor technology dispenses with silicon altogether, producing FlexICs, flexible integrated circuits, capable of tracking individual items through complex supply chains and giving consumers verifiable provenance in a way QR codes simply cannot. A bottle of wine can carry its full origin story; a packet of medication bought on Temu or Amazon can be authenticated as the real thing rather than a counterfeit. In time, the chips will power continuous glucose monitors and other slim, flexible medical devices used in the prevention of type-2 diabetes.

The contrast with the conventional fab model is just as striking. Where a Taiwanese or Korean facility can cost tens of billions and take months to push a wafer through its production cycle, Pragmatic’s modular plant requires materially less capital and turns chips out in days. Inside the 30-by-20-metre clean room, robots glide along ceiling tracks shuttling glass-backed substrates between a metal-oxide deposition machine, a photolithography rig that imposes the circuit image, and an etching station that chemically carves out each layer. The finished wafers, each carrying up to 50,000 chips, pass to an assembly room where they are diced and bonded to antenna-bearing circuits. The result emerges from the line looking, disarmingly, like a translucent roll of snowflake-patterned Christmas paper.

An IPO in the cross-hairs

Chief executive David Moore, who relocated from Idaho-headquartered Micron in 2023, is unambiguous about ambition. “Our goal is to be one of the largest semiconductor companies in the world,” he says. Pragmatic’s “north star”, he adds, is “a potential IPO”.

In June he is in Europe and China to meet customers, before turning to the US in July. The reception, he says, is warm. “We engage with the CEOs and chairmen of those customers. They see it as something very strategic and don’t look at us as some outlier UK-based semiconductor company. They see us as a world leader in FlexIC technology. It is now all about orders and shipping.”

Moore is, however, careful to temper near-term expectations. Each new fabrication facility, even with Pragmatic’s simplified processes, will take 12 to 14 months to bring online. The Durham site has space for seven more lines, equating to “capacity for tens of billions of ICs per year”. Significant revenues are expected this year for the first time, with a “milestone-based” path to gross margin, break-even and ultimately free cashflow.

Capital, and the british industrial strategy in action

The funding base behind that journey is unusually domestic. Pragmatic’s December 2023 raise remains the largest semiconductor venture round in European history, with around 70 per cent of the £162 million coming from UK pools of capital, the National Wealth Fund, the British Business Bank, the public/private Northern Gritstone fund and M&G’s Catalyst fund among them. A subsequent extension lifted the round to £179 million. It is precisely the sort of patient, blended-capital deployment that ministers have been pointing to as evidence the £1bn government commitment to the UK microchip industry is starting to bite, alongside earlier schemes that supported a wave of British chip start-ups.

In March 2024, HRH The Princess Royal formally opened Pragmatic Park, home to the UK’s first 300mm wafer fab, with the company committing to 500 highly skilled new jobs over five years.

Ciaran Mulligan, chief investment officer at M&G Life, who oversees £188 billion of client assets, says the case for institutional money is straightforward. “Our scale enables us to invest into private companies, opening up opportunities you simply don’t see in public markets. By sourcing these investments directly through our asset management teams, we can back businesses that are growing, creating jobs and driving innovation.”

The team behind the technology

Founded in Cambridge in 2010 by Richard Price and Scott White, Pragmatic has worked with the Centre for Process Innovation in Sedgefield, County Durham, since 2012. Its workforce now stands at 350, weighted heavily towards PhD-level researchers across the Sedgefield, Durham and Cambridge sites. The chair is Peter Herweck, the former chief executive of Schneider Electric and, before that, of the FTSE 100 software group Aveva, which Schneider bought for £9.5 billion in 2023. The board also includes former Intel chief engineering officer Murthy Renduchintala.

Talent retention in the North East is a quietly significant part of the story. Heather Flint, 31, moved from Lincoln to study in Newcastle, stayed on for a PhD in physical chemistry, her research was on translucent solar cells designed to be embedded in windows, and was contemplating a move south to Cambridge or overseas when she came across Pragmatic. “Staying up north was quite important to me. I just love it,” she says. The R&D team built a role around her. Three years and three promotions later, she has moved from device development to lead design scientist and now into project management. “There is something new every day.”

The company actively recruits postgraduates into its research and technical roles and apprentices into technician roles. Its youngest team member, based in Cambridge, is 21. “In the evening he builds robots for fun,” a spokeswoman noted.

The bigger picture

Whether Pragmatic ultimately lists in London, New York or both will be one of the more closely watched decisions in British technology over the next 24 months. What is already clear is that, by combining a genuinely novel product, a capital-light manufacturing model and an unusually British shareholder register, the company has handed Westminster a rare worked example of its industrial strategy actually working — and quietly assembled the sort of platform from which a UK national champion could, plausibly, take on the giants of Hsinchu, Pyeongtaek and Phoenix.

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The British chipmaker quietly building a global challenger in county Durham