DSIT

DSIT (the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology) was created in February 2023 from a split of the former Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport and the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. It is responsible for Science funding through UK Research and Innovation, broadband and telecoms regulation, and the UK's AI and technology strategy, including the AI Security Institute. The department also oversees the UK's relationship with the DMCC Act, the domestic equivalent of the EU's Digital Markets Act. Liz Kendall has served as Secretary of State since July 2024. The original Sovereign AI Unit, a £500m commitment launched in 2025 under chair James Wise, preceded DSIT's first cohort announcement and provided the programme's investment envelope. DSIT is now the delivery nexus of a multi-instrument UK industrial portfolio spanning the Sovereign AI Unit, the Life Sciences Innovative Manufacturing Fund, EIS reform, the British Business Bank and the AI Growth Zones push in Scotland and northern England, cumulatively targeting £1bn in life-sciences and AI investment by summer 2026.

On 16 April 2026 DSIT's Sovereign AI Unit (SAIU) named its first cohort: direct equity investment in Callosum, plus up to one million GPU hours each on the AIRR compute network for Prima Mente, Cosine, Cursive, Doubleword, Twig Bio and Odyssey. Days earlier, on 14 April, DSIT's Life Sciences Innovative Manufacturing Fund allocated over £80m to four regional sites: Accord Healthcare in Barnstaple, the University of Birmingham's Precision Health Technologies Accelerator, Codis in Haverhill, and Norgine in Hengoed. In May 2026 the SAIU made its first cross-cohort co-investment, joining Isomorphic Labs' Series B alongside Alphabet vehicles GV and CapitalG and Abu Dhabi's MGX; Isomorphic Labs is an Alphabet spin-out, so the co-investment marked the SAIU's first external commitment alongside private and foreign sovereign capital rather than a pure UK portfolio company. DSIT also committed £16m (with UKRI's £20m) that month to expand Cambridge's DAWN supercomputer sixfold on AMD MI355X accelerators, with successor system Zenith due in spring 2027. On 18 May, Secretary of State Liz Kendall launched the AI and Future of Work Unit, a cross-government body spanning DSIT, DWP, DfE, BEIS and HM Treasury targeting 10 million people upskilled in AI by 2030, with 2 million inside SMEs; for the first time DSIT formally coordinates with DWP and DfE on labour-market adaptation, not just technology supply. DSIT separately co-hosted the TechFirst AI skills programme launch with Kim McGuinness and Liz Kendall, targeting 30,000 pupils in North East England, and a RUSI AI hardware event provided the backdrop for the National Wealth Fund's first defence-AI investment, in Rowden Technologies, with DSIT framing defence-tech AI within the broader industrial strategy. Now that the first cohort exists and £80m of manufacturing grants are committed, the test has shifted from ambition to execution.

DSIT steered the UK Cyber Security and Resilience Bill through its report stage and third reading in the House of Commons on 10 June 2026, widening the reportable-incident definition to cover Integrity and security compromises, pre-positioning and ransomware. The consulted ransomware-payment ban for CNI operators and the economy-wide payment-reporting duty were absent from the published bill text; Canada's Bill C-8 cleared its Senate the same week, establishing parallel Five Eyes CNI cyber legislation.

The Sovereign AI Unit's Strategic Assets Grants Programme published open eligibility criteria with a 5 June 2026 Deadline, running alongside a parallel ARIA £100m Scaling Compute programme, and DSIT's £1.1bn AI Hardware Plan, announced on 8 June at London Tech Week, added a £750m national AI supercomputer from 2030, £400m for chip purchasing and a £150m advance-customer commitment via the British Business Bank and Playground Global. DSIT launched the second wave of its Sovereign AI procurement around 3 July 2026, worth £96m in total: contracts of up to £5m each, running to March 2030, across seven sectors (Science, health, defence, cyber, transport, energy and public services), a shift from the first cohort's equity and GPU-hours model to buying outcomes directly through procurement. The Sovereign AI Unit places DSIT in direct tension with Brussels' regulatory-led approach to AI governance: where the EU pursues compliance clarity and penalties for non-compliance, DSIT emphasises investment-led competitiveness and lighter-touch domestic regulation. Critics note the UK's commitments, even combined, remain a fraction of the EU's €43bn Chips Act; DSIT officials argue the UK's strength lies in AI model research rather than semiconductor manufacturing.