FTI Consulting News Bytes – 13 June 2025

FTI Consulting News Bytes

This week, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the EU’s compute power shortage “will be resolved” soon given 20 data centres are planned across the continent in the next few years. In consumer tech news, Snap plans to launch its first consumer pair of AR glasses next year, whilst TikTok unveiled plans to create over 500 jobs in the UK taking its total UK workforce to 3,000. Elsewhere, Meta is creating a new A.I. lab to pursue ‘Superintelligence’. The company has acquired data labelling start up Scale AI for $15 billion as it aims to keep up with its rivals in the AI tech race. Finally, in this week’s spending review, UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced she is targeting efficiency gains of £14bn by the end of parliament, driven by the increasing usage of AI across government departments. 

This week’s news

EU computing power gets an upgrade

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says Europe’s shortfall in computing power for AI “will be resolved” soon. At VivaTech conference in Paris and as reported by the Financial Times, at least 20 AI data centres are planned across Europe in the next few years and this will include five gigafactories that should lead to a tenfold increase in Europe’s data center capacity within the next two years. His comments came after earlier in the week, he said that the UK was “missing” the infrastructure it needed to fulfil its AI potential. Huang, more broadly, is on tour around Europe championing the concept of “sovereign AI,” which is the idea of indigenous-built AI infrastructure, whereby companies/regions build AI infrastructure for their own markets rather than relying on non-local players.

Snap AR glasses to launch next year

Snap plans to launch its first consumer pair of AR glasses next year. Bloomberg highlights how it beats a planned release from rival Meta by several months. The new eyewear, called Specs, will be a smaller and lighter version of a device called Spectacles it made available to software developers last year. Those glasses, which are available to developers for $99 per month, are run on  the company’s Snap OS operating system and are controlled using hand gestures, two features that will come to the consumer version. The Specs won’t use an external battery and the updated design will focus on comfort and usability. They will also include an AI assistant, a way to play games with friends and a “workstation” area where users can do things like browse the web and stream video. Prices have not yet been disclosed.

TikTok to create over 500 UK jobs as major plans revealed

TikTok is to create more than 500 jobs and open a second office in London. The company confirmed its UK workforce will expand to 3,000 by the end of 2025 and it will open a new 135,000 sq ft office in London’s Barbican. The group already has its UK headquarters in Farringdon, which were opened in 2022, while its new base is slated to open its doors in early 2026. City AM reported that TikTok has revealed that the number of people in the UK using its app has passed the 30m milestone for the first time, adding that the news means the UK is now the platform’s largest user community in Europe.

Meta scales its AI offer

The New York Times provided details about Meta’s plans to launch a “superintelligence” AI lab as the company  seeks to catch up with rivals and stay competitive in the tech race. It plans to invest about $15 billion in data-labelling startup Scale AI, as part of a deal that would bring other its co-founder, Alexandr Wang and top researchers to the company. Scale AI manually labels data to train advance AI models and helps businesses and governments build AI technologies. Its knowledge and expertise to the research lab is part of Meta’s broader efforts on AI and would help create a transformative system that exceeds the power of the human brain. It is expected that for the deal to be announced in the week and would give Meta a 49% stake in Scale AI.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves targets government productivity gains

UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves bet heavy on technology and innovation in her Spending Review this week, banking on AI and productivity gains from the adoption of AI to help deliver efficiency gains totalling £14bn by the end of the parliament. She also hiked research and development funding to a record high of £22.6bn per year by the end of the Spending Review period. According to the Financial Times, the bulk of these savings are supposed to flow from the NHS productivity plan, which targets efficiencies of almost £9bn a year by 2028-29 and added that she is also counting on a rollout of AI and automation across government – both in public-facing service delivery and in the daily work of officials.  

Top Tweets of the Week

• Bloomberg tweets: “The US and China have agreed in principle to a framework for deescalating trade tensions by implementing the consensus they reached in Geneva.”
• The Transcript tweets: “Sam Altman: As datacenter production gets automated, the cost of intelligence should eventually converge to near the cost of electricity. (People are often curious about how much energy a ChatGPT query uses; the average query uses about 0.34 watt-hours.”
• Mark Gurman, Managing Editor at Bloomberg tweets: “Excellent WWDC: Cohesive story, deep integration and continuity across the devices, zero false promises, impressive new UI and significant new productivity features on the Mac and iPad. But the lack of any real new AI features, despite that being my expectation, is startling.”
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Number of the week

14bn The productivity gains expected from the adoption of AI across the UK government to help deliver efficiency savings. (Financial Times)