'My concerns over our reliance on US-controlled cloud computing systems'
Mounjaro is now the most dispensed branded medicine in Britain, with Iqvia counting 16.3 million units in the year to March. UCL researchers counted 1.6 million adults on a weight-loss jab in the year to early 2025, four in five of them on Mounjaro.
The NHS is barely in this. Two million were buying privately by mid-2025, at £100 to £300 a month, from online clinics and the corner chemist. All of it from one American firm. Then, last September, Lilly moved the price. The top dose went from £122 to £330, up 170 per cent, with smaller doses up by 30 to 138 per cent. Lilly said it was bringing Britain into line with Europe, and within days it cut suppliers a deal at £247.50. The NHS was shielded by a separate agreement.
Forget the money. One foreign company, selling something with no substitute, nearly trebled a British price, and nobody here could do a thing about it. Trump had written to 17 drug firms, Lilly among them, telling them Americans must stop paying more than everyone else, and Lilly backed the idea. Now put that power where Britain runs its computers.
AI has stopped being a side project. The ONS says 35 per cent of firms with ten or more staff now use it, against 12 per cent three years ago, and half of the big ones do. Whitehall has its own suite, Humphrey, and has booked £45bn of productivity savings against digital reform it cannot deliver without renting somebody else’s machines. Amazon is sold out. Its boss Matt Garman said in August that most capacity is spoken for through 2027 and into 2028, with demand still beating supply. Amazon will spend $220bn this year on more. Customers now sign five-year deals to get in the queue. Ask a British founder what they cannot buy. Cosine trains its coding model on public kit in Bristol because the state gave it the hours, and ministers are handing startups a million GPU hours each, which they would not do if the hours were for sale.
Britain is hooked. In 2023/24, 95 per cent of central and local government bodies paid for hyperscale cloud, rising to 99 per cent once you count the software sitting on top. Of the £17.7bn paid to the biggest technology suppliers, £9.9bn went to the three Americans or their resellers. The Ministry of Defence spent £1.09bn. HMRC spent £1.01bn. I have argued here that British firms were wrong to fear the cloud, and I stand by that. The kit is safe. What I got wrong was the law, because the American CLOUD Act lets Washington reach data held by American firms wherever the servers happen to sit, Leeds included.
We are hooked because the American product is cheaper and better. OVHcloud will keep your data in Europe, but not the ecosystem, and whoever switches pays in features. Our regulator knew it, which is partly why it blinked in March, taking promises from Amazon and Microsoft after ministers told it not to frighten off investment. Britain’s answer is £1.1bn. The supercomputer it buys will not switch on until 2030. Our biggest AI machine is Microsoft’s money and Nvidia’s chips. On Friday morning somebody in Whitehall will open a laptop that starts up in Redmond, and no balance sheet records it as a risk. Sovereignty is being able to say no.
David Richards is an entrepreneur and philanthropist