AI minister Kanishka Narayan said chip building and drones would be central to Andy Burnham’s plan to “reindustrialise” Britain.
Narayan told the Financial Times, that the government did not want daft “tech boosterism” and would use regulation to tackle AI’s risks to jobs and national security.
Narayan said Britain needed to keep crucial emerging technologies under domestic control as ministers were “learning the lessons of the past”, when promising British tech companies were flogged off before the country got much benefit.
Burnham replaced Sir Keir Starmer as Labour leader and promised to “reindustrialise” Britain while rejecting “wrong turns in the 1980s”.
Narayan, whose AI role under Starmer was more junior, said Burnham’s plan was not some reheated nostalgia act. AI was “the way to reindustrialise this country” and that he was “focused on AI chips being built here”.
Narayan said hardware was “where most of the economic value, most of the leverage and most of the supply chain constraint is. It’s what the British public wants to reindustrialise”.
He said AI-powered drones would matter in “modern re-industrialisation in the defence context.”
To understand Burnham’s vision, Narayan said, “we should think about chip factories. We should think about drones and defence, and we should think about AI being applied to run manufacturing processes better.”
“The 36-year-old minister said he would push for state AI investment, visas for top engineers and planning reform to speed up technology infrastructure.
Britain’s chipmaking base remains thin, and Narayan admitted the shift would “not going to be overnight”.
Still, he said Britain had “amazing strengths in chip design” and wanted it to “build a manufacturing ambition focused on AI chips as well”.
In June, the government pledged £1.1bn, about €1.27bn, for AI hardware, including a £150mn, about €173mn, commitment to buy chips from British groups.
Narayan said he wanted “British companies can get first dibs at being able to sell so that they can grow”.
After the US government slapped export controls on Anthropic’s Mythos model, Narayan said AI was “now the central faultline in geopolitics”.
He said Britain’s answer had to be “to build our own capabilities so we have leverage”.
Narayan pointed to Arm, the Cambridge chip designer now owned by Japan’s SoftBank and listed in New York, as the sort of story ministers would rather not repeat.
Narayan said he welcomed foreign investment but wanted “the bulk of the economic value, the bulk of the strategic value and the jobs to stay here in the UK.”
“We can’t have a situation where the best shots that we have at large-scale economic value and strategic leverage for this country are started here, initially scaled here but ultimately supported elsewhere,” Narayan said.
