Microsoft has withdrawn from a planned role as the anchor tenant at a major artificial intelligence data centre being developed by British firm Nscale in Loughton, Essex. The project, valued at around £2 billion and previously described as the UK’s largest AI data centre, had been expected to host a large-scale supercomputer for Microsoft.⁠ The facility was due to come online around late 2026 or early 2027, with plans for roughly 23,000 Nvidia GB300 GPUs delivering about 50 m