The chancellor says it's a "massive day in the UK's ambition to be the next Silicon Valley".

Microsoft says its £2.5bn UK investment will enable more than a million people to gain crucial skills in the burgeoning sphere of artificial intelligence (AI), reports Sky News.

The US tech firm's president, Brad Smith, said its three-year programme led by datacentre expansion from 2026 was "the most important infrastructure of the second quarter of the 21st century".

Training and partnership programmes, the latter concentrating on AI safety and research with government and universities, are the other major elements.

Speaking on a visit to the construction site for the new London datacentre, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt said it was a "massive day in the UK's ambition to be the next Silicon Valley" and a "massive vote of confidence by Microsoft who do think the UK is going to be the next Silicon Valley".

The £2.5bn investment was announced earlier this week as part of almost £30bn in foreign direct investment secured by the government ahead of its Global Investment Summit, said Sky News

The Treasury said Microsoft was bringing more than 20,000 of the most advanced Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) - crucial for machine learning and the development of AI models - to the country.

A statement said: "This is the single largest investment in its 40-year history in the country which will see Microsoft grow its UK AI infrastructure across sites in London and Cardiff and potential expansion into northern England, helping to meet the exploding demand for efficient, scalable and sustainable AI specific compute power."

Mr Smith said during a tour of the London site that in the five-storey complex there would be the world's most advanced computer chips, the servers, they will provide the AI infrastructure for much of the UK.

"We're doing this in London, in Cardiff, in all probability in northern England. What we're announcing today is Microsoft is investing £2.5bn in the next three years to build that infrastructure and then combining that with a programme to provide AI skills to more than a million people."