The New Frontier - Your weekly science and innovation update - 25th March 2026

Reeves places her chips: Quantum, AI, the North and the Arc

Rachel Reeves used her Mais Lecture to announce more than £6 billion in commitments across four areas that matter directly for real estate: a £2 billion quantum technology package (the UK’s largest ever), a £500 million Sovereign AI Fund, £2.3 billion in City Investment Funds directed to metro mayors (with £1.7 billion specifically for northern city regions), and a doubling of investment in the Oxford-Cambridge corridor to £800 million.  As always caution should be applied in terms of whether these are new commitments or part of previously announced packages.

In particular,  four things stand out for science and innovation.

First, the Oxford-Cambridge corridor is now firmly an infrastructure-led growth play. The government announced new Development Corporations for Greater Oxford in addition to one for Greater Cambridge, modelled on those that transformed Canary Wharf and the Olympic Park. Most strikingly, Reeves signalled willingness to use compulsory purchase powers where landowners are “intransigent”. The government projects £78 billion in additional GVA by 2035. East West Rail remains the backbone.

Second, the northern investment package could positively benefit cities spanning Manchester, Liverpool, Bradford, Leeds, Sheffield and York.  Manchester receives £175 million from the City Densification Fund, West Yorkshire £145 million, the North East £120 million, Liverpool £95 million, and South Yorkshire £85 million. A new Manchester Digital Campus on brownfield land in Ancoats will house 8,800 civil servants focused on digital work. A £51 million National Cryogenics Facility at Daresbury in Liverpool City Region will become a global hub for ultra-low-temperature research relevant to quantum and fusion. Elsewhere South Yorkshire will receive investment to boost its defence sector. Perhaps most consequentially, the Treasury is developing a roadmap for fiscal devolution — giving metro mayors a guaranteed share of central tax revenue, including income tax.

Third, the quantum announcement anchored by a £1 billion procurement programme called ProQure is designed to build a domestic commercial ecosystem, deploying and making Quantum computers at scale by the early 2030s. The government projects 100,000 jobs and £212 billion in economic impact by 2045. Whether those numbers materialise is debatable (TechMarketView called them “a pipe dream right now”), but the procurement commitment itself should generate demand for suitable real estate and infrastructure around Oxford, Bristol, Cambridge and the other quantum clusters where public money is now flowing.

Fourth, The government is placing its bets on AI for economic growth, with an ambition to make Britain the fastest growing country in the G7 for AI adoption. A new AI Economics Institute will measure the impact of AI on productivity and labour markets and £45 million will be ploughed into a supercomputer called Sunrise at the Culham Campus in Oxfordshire.

The commitment to a deeper relationship with the EU is also of note, potentially leading to greater collaboration in science and innovation R&D.

All of this landed against a shaky backdrop. The OBR cut growth to 1.1%, The Bank of England is holding rates at 3.75%, energy costs have spiked, the British Chambers of Commerce forecast business investment to flatline to zero and data from the Entrepeneurs Network found that a fifth of British entrepreneurs expect to leave the country in the next 12 months. Around 86 per cent of the 272 entrepreneurs surveyed by the network said the Labour government does not understand their needs. Around two-third also reported issues with hiring new staff, which follows the string of pressures on the jobs market. There were also reports on delays in executing government plans. The ambition is real. The fiscal space, execution and business confidence is not guaranteed.

Roche builds pharma’s largest AI factory and the lab spec sheet changes

Roche announced the deployment of 2,176 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs across the US and Europe, bringing its total on-premises infrastructure to more than 3,500 GPUs,  the largest announced footprint in the pharmaceutical industry. The system spans drug discovery (using NVIDIA’s BioNeMo platform in a continuous “Lab-in-the-Loop”), manufacturing (digital twins via Omniverse, already applied to a new GLP-1 facility in North Carolina), diagnostics (Parabricks for genomic analysis), and digital health (NeMo Guardrails for clinical AI).

This follows Eli Lilly and NVIDIA’s $1 billion co-innovation lab in the Bay Area, announced in January, and comparable partnerships with Novo Nordisk and Merck. The pattern is unmistakable: large pharmaceutical companies are moving AI from pilot projects to enterprise-wide infrastructure embedded across the entire value chain.

The lobster in the room

If you haven’t encountered OpenClaw yet, you will. Created by an Austrian developer as a weekend project in November 2025, it has become one of the fastest adopted open-source projects in history. It is an autonomous AI agent designed to run locally on a user’s machine, acting as a personal assistant by integrating with messaging platforms to perform, manage and schedule tasks. It is model-agnostic, which means it can be integrated with various large language models, such as Claude and OpenAI. In China, nearly 1,000 people queued outside Baidu’s headquarters to have it installed on their laptops. Tencent launched a suite of OpenClaw-compatible products integrated with WeChat and this week Jensen Huang declared it “the most important release of software, probably ever”.  The rapid roll-out of OpenClaw underscores that autonomous agentic workflows continue to be a rapidly growing field. It also highlights the growing need for data security to be seen as a building service as the high level of autonomy of OpenClaw has led to significant security concerns.

Other interesting reads this week

A new centre from Imperial, Oxford and GSK will build digital twins of lungs, livers and kidneys.

Uber and NVIDIA announced an expansion of their AV partnership. The companies, supported by their growing roster of automaker partners, plan to launch a global fleet of entirely NVIDIA software-driven autonomous vehicles, starting in Los Angeles and San Francisco in the first half of 2027 and scaling across 28 cities globally by 2028.

Embecta to acquire UK-based medical device firm Owen Mumford for up to £150 million.

R1 Therapeutics is debuting with an oversubscribed $77.5 million series A financing aimed at advancing its first-in-class therapy for chronic kidney disease (CKD) patients on dialysis with high phosphate levels.

Cambridge biotech company Mestag Therapeutics has closed a $40 million financing round and added two senior executives to its team as it advances its pipeline towards the clinic.