- An answer to ending reliance on foreign-owned hyperscale providers as Mercury provides the first viable UK-based alternative.
- Every model is trained and hosted in GB, ensuring sensitive British data and AI usage stay strictly under British jurisdiction.
- The series ranges from 0.8B Edge Intelligence models for local apps to a 256B-parameter Frontier Power model for the most complex tasks.
- The entire stack is powered by 100% renewable energy.
Locai Labs, the UK’s sovereign AI company, and Civo, the British sovereign cloud provider, have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to undertake Project Mercury.
Project Mercury is a programme to build the UK’s first pre-trained, sovereign large language models (LLMs), designed to reclaim British digital autonomy.
Currently, the UK operates as a “digital tenant,” reliant on foreign-owned hyperscale cloud providers and AI model developers for its most sensitive computational needs. These companies are subject to control from their host nation governments. The Mercury Series aims to end this dependency. The intention is that the partnership proves that the UK possesses the talent, the infrastructure, and the vision to develop, train, and host frontier-level AI entirely on home soil.
James Drayson, Co-Founder & CEO of Locai Labs, comments:
“This partnership is a pivotal moment for UK AI. By combining our advanced Mercury model development with Civo’s UK sovereign cloud infrastructure, we’re creating a trusted, homegrown AI ecosystem that meets the highest standards of security, sustainability, and performance. The technology of the future is being built right here. AI’s coming home!”
By providing a domestic alternative to foreign infrastructure and AI, Mercury reduces the geopolitical vulnerabilities associated with overseas-controlled data centres and AI models and ensures that British data and the use of AI by UK citizens stays under British jurisdiction.
The Mercury Series will be a family of LLMs engineered to meet the stringent security, residency, and compliance requirements of both the public and private sectors. These new models will be available from Civo Sovereign Cloud resident in the UK or deployed and hosted on-premise within an enterprise’s own IT infrastructure.
The series will feature a range of models built and trained entirely in the UK:
- Edge Intelligence: Efficient 0.8-30 billion-parameter models designed for local, low-latency applications.
- Frontier Power: 256 billion-parameter models capable of handling the most complex generative AI tasks.
This collaboration arrives as the UK government accelerates its investment in domestic AI through the £500 million Sovereign AI Fund. The Mercury Series is the direct answer to the national goal of making the UK a maker of AI rather than just a taker of AI developed elsewhere. Furthermore, the Mercury Series will be developed using 100% renewable energy, proving that the future of British AI is as sustainable as it is powerful.
Mark Boost, Founder and CEO of Civo, comments:
“Together, we are building a local ecosystem by creating a domestic alternative that reduces reliance on foreign-based infrastructure. This partnership proves the UK can develop, train and host sovereign LLMs entirely on home soil, showing what two UK‑founded companies can deliver for the security and trust of other UK‑based enterprises.”
