UK Government’s Sovereign AI venture fund has awarded investment to OLIX, a British company designing the next generation of AI chips.

The company is based in London and has offices in Bristol, and is working to develop faster, cheaper and more energy-efficient AI chips.

It is one of the UK's newest unicorns, being valued at more than $1 billion.

The government believes that British firms developing advanced chips will help strengthen the UK’s domestic AI capability, create high-skilled jobs and ensure more of the economic benefits of AI are realised in Britain.

OLIX is trying to make AI chips cheaper and better reforming, by developing  family of ‘inference chips’ - designed specifically with AI in mind - each of which specialises in a particular part of an AI model’s ‘thinking’ process. It is hoped that specialised chips working together in this way could pave the way for AI that is cheaper, uses less energy, and performs better.

AI Minister Kanishka Narayan said: "The future of AI will be built on chips that power models. Countries that build chips will build leverage.

"OLIX is exactly the kind of ambitious company we want to back through Sovereign AI. In just two years, it has established itself as one of the UK’s most exciting AI startups, developing breakthrough chip technology with the potential to help shape the future of AI.

"If we want Britain to lead in AI, we need to back the technologies that sit underneath it. That’s how we’ll attract investment, create high-skilled jobs and ensure the UK remains a country that builds the future of AI, not just uses it."