London Tech Week opened the way these events increasingly do: with a leaderboard of investment pledges. By the end of the first morning, the UK had collected several billion pounds in AI commitments, most of it aimed at the unglamorous machinery of compute. Prime Minister Keir Starmer kicked off the keynotes with a new national AI compute strategy, including £400mn to buy specialist AI chips and expand the country’s computing capacity, part of a push he framed around keeping British firms able to “start here, scale here and stay here”. The bigger numbers came from industry. AMD committed up to…