Business

UK semiconductor start-up Fractile has announced a £100 million expansion of its British operations, scaling up in London and Bristol as ministers intensify calls for greater domestic ownership of critical artificial intelligence technology. The investment, to be deployed over the next three years, will fund a new industrial hardware engineering facility in Bristol, alongside the expansion of Fractile’s existing UK sites and a significant increase in its domestic workforce. The company is focused on developing...

Apple and Google have agreed to make changes to their UK app stores following intervention by the country’s competition watchdog, after it concluded the two firms hold an “effective duopoly” over the sector. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said the tech giants have committed to a series of measures designed to improve transparency and competition. These include pledges not to give preferential treatment to their own apps and to be clearer about how third-party...

UK government borrowing costs climbed on Monday as markets reacted to intensifying pressure on Sir Keir Starmer, with investors pricing in heightened political risk and the possibility of a shift towards more left-leaning Labour policies. The yield on the benchmark 10-year UK government bond rose by as much as 0.08 percentage points to nearly 4.6 per cent, while yields on 30-year gilts reached their steepest level since November. Bond yields move inversely to prices, meaning...

The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) has launched a new expert-led commission to examine the future of occupational safety and health (OSH) skills in the UK, amid growing concerns over workforce shortages and rising pressures on safety professionals. Convened in partnership with Speedy Hire, the OSH Skills Commission brings together leading figures from across industry, trade unions and professional bodies to develop practical solutions to skills challenges that threaten workplace safety and...

London-based energy technology company Tem has raised $75 million in fresh funding as it looks to expand internationally and accelerate the rollout of its AI-driven platform designed to cut business electricity bills by up to 30 per cent. The funding round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and is understood to value the four-year-old company at around $300 million. Tem plans to use the capital to further develop its technology and scale its operations in...

Official Budget forecasts were accessed almost 25,000 times before their formal release after a leak at the Office for Budget Responsibility, according to a new investigation by the UK’s cyber security authorities. A report by the National Cyber Security Centre found that documents prepared by the Office for Budget Responsibility were downloaded on “at least” 24,701 occasions in the hour before Rachel Reeves delivered her Budget speech on 26 November. The figure is far higher...

Barclays is turning to artificial intelligence to power the next phase of its turnaround, as the bank targets around £2 billion of cost savings and commits to returning more than £15 billion of surplus capital to shareholders by the end of 2028. C.S. Venkatakrishnan, the chief executive, widely known as Venkat, said the bank would pursue about £2 billion of gross efficiency savings over the next three years, alongside increased investment in technology, including AI,...

The UK Government has confirmed a new wave of onshore renewable energy projects under the Contracts for Difference scheme, following last month’s record-breaking offshore wind auction. Results from Allocation Round 7 (AR7) show 4.9GW of solar and 1.3GW of onshore wind capacity secured across Britain, reinforcing the pace at which clean power is being rolled out across the country. Solar projects were awarded contracts at a strike price of £65.23 per megawatt hour (in 2024...

Innovate UK has awarded more than £300,000 in funding to a collaboration between the NIHR HealthTech Research Centre in Sustainable Innovation and UK healthtech company Sanome, to accelerate the development of an AI-enabled system for the early detection of hospital-acquired infections. The 18-month SMART grant will support the co-design and roll-out of MEMORI, a Class IIb CE-certified software-as-a-medical-device (SaMD) platform that analyses real-time clinical data to predict infection risk up to seven days before symptoms...

A High Court judge has ruled that thousands of people affected by a major data breach at Capita can continue with their legal action against the outsourcing group, in a decision being described as a landmark for large-scale data privacy claims in the UK. In a judgment handed down on 9 February, Master Dagnall rejected arguments from Capita’s legal team that solicitors acting for more than 8,000 claimants had abused the court process. Capita had...