SOFAIR secures £60m from UKRI and EPSRC
This article covers SOFAIR, a university-led research lab, which has secured up to £60m in a growth funding round to develop the next generation of AI that is cheaper to run, more dependable and easier for British organisations to adopt. The funding supports two university-led labs and aims to broaden uptake across public services, industry and research by lowering technical and financial barriers.
SOFAIR and a companion lab backed by UK government funding have secured up to £60 million in a growth funding round to develop the next generation of AI that is cheaper to run, more dependable and easier for British organisations to adopt. The announcement funds two university-led labs — SOFAIR (led at UCL) and BOLD (led at Oxford) — which will pursue open-source models and new learning paradigms intended to broaden AI use across public services, industry and research.
Why it matters
The UK has strong academic foundations in AI, but many current systems remain costly to train and brittle in real-world settings. By targeting fundamental changes — from models that run on widely available hardware to approaches that learn more efficiently — the labs aim to lower the technical and financial barriers that prevent smaller organisations and public services from using advanced AI.
That matters for use cases already starting to appear in the economy: diagnostic tools in hospitals, optimisation in energy systems and drug discovery workflows. If successful, the research could make such applications cheaper to operate, easier to deploy and less dependent on a narrow set of commercial model providers.
Inside the product
The funding will support two complementary programmes.
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SOFAIR (Science of Fundamental AI Research) is led from UCL and brings together Cambridge, Oxford and Edinburgh to build open-source AI technologies that can run on more common hardware. Its remit spans computer science, mathematics, statistics and neuroscience, with an emphasis on reliability and reducing dependency on closed models.
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BOLD (British Open-ended Learning and Discovery), led by Oxford with partners including UCL and Imperial College London, will explore new learning paradigms so systems can adapt more efficiently to new situations and interact with the physical world. The lab emphasises practical, human-centred research intended to translate into tools for workplaces and public infrastructure.
Both labs will recruit across career stages, with at least £2 million per lab earmarked to hire doctoral students and support academic talent. They will also have access to large-scale computing resources to run model training and experiments.
Who are the investors?
The programme is funded by UK government-backed research bodies through UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). Specifically, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) will distribute up to £60 million to the two labs over six years, and the announcement includes access to large-scale computing power valued at tens of millions of pounds. The package doubles an earlier commitment, increasing investment from a previously planned £40 million to up to £60 million and expands one planned lab into two.
The labs will work closely with national research infrastructure such as the Alan Turing Institute and UKRI’s AI research hubs. Funding includes a minimum allocation for doctoral recruitment — roughly £2 million per lab to hire at least ten PhD students — aimed at growing the UK talent pipeline.
In the announcement, Kanishka Narayan, AI Minister at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, said:
We are only just beginning to unlock AI’s huge potential to grow our economy and improve our public services. With our world-leading universities and deep pool of AI expertise, Britain can set the agenda for what comes next. These new labs will lead the world in the fundamental work that is set to make AI cheaper, more practical and easier to adopt so more businesses and public services across the UK can benefit. And by building this capability here at home, backed by our world leading universities, we’re strengthening our own expertise, reducing reliance on others and securing Britain’s place at the forefront of this technology, fittingly announced on what would have been Alan Turing’s 114th birthday.
In the announcement, Professor Charlotte Deane, Senior Responsible Owner for the UKRI AI Programme and Executive Chair of EPSRC, said:
The UK is already one of the world’s leading nations in AI research. We are one of the few countries in the world with all the right ingredients, from a deep pool of top AI experts to world-class universities. These labs will put that advantage to work, backing the bold, high-reward ideas that can shape the future of AI. We look forward to working with the labs to maximise the benefits for the UK.
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Founder perspective
The lab leads frame the work as an alternative to the compute-and-scale approaches used by the largest tech firms.
In the announcement, David Barber, Lead Professor at UCL, said:
We’re very excited that UCL will be the leading the new SOFAIR Lab. While current AI systems are impressive, many still suffer from basic issues such as inaccurate responses to questions. These systems often use similar underlying architectures, so SOFAIR will bring together the broader sciences and fresh ideas to create a new generation of open-source models. This will reduce dependency on the small number of model providers, boosting UK sovereignty and its position as a global player in AI.
In the announcement, Jakob Foerster, Associate Professor at the University of Oxford, said:
The UK cannot win the global AI race simply by trying to outspend the largest technology companies on data and compute. BOLD is about a different route: discovering fundamentally new ways to build AI that are more efficient, more open and better aligned with human needs. By focusing on new paradigms for learning, rather than only scaling existing methods, we aim to help secure the UK’s sovereign capability in AI and ensure that academic research can shape the future of the field.
Both leads emphasise openness, efficiency and alignment with human uses rather than raw scaling. The labs plan to translate theoretical work into tooling and methods that can be adopted outside elite research labs.
The bigger picture
This investment sits within UKRI’s wider AI Strategy, a £1.6 billion plan to bolster UK research and capability over the coming years. The decision to double the initial funding and create two labs signals a policy direction that privileges fundamental research, talent development and onshore capability over trying to match hyperscalers dollar for dollar.
Success will depend on turning academic advances into accessible software, accessible compute footprints and workable governance models for public-sector adoption. If the labs deliver on those aims, they could reduce vendor dependency for British institutions and broaden the set of organisations able to use advanced AI.
The announcement reinforces the UK’s research-led approach to AI and will be watched closely across Europe as governments and universities consider how to balance open research, commercial competitiveness and national resilience.
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