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#sovereign#data#models#relax#more#https#why#need#where#country
Discussion (92 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
We spun out in 2026 to focus on sovereign inference and UK workloads that need in-country processing. UK-resident founders. Not a UK subsidiary of a foreign hyperscaler or model provider — wholly UK-owned and operated, running in Civo’s LON1 datacentre.
ICO-registered, NCSC-aligned, on G-Cloud via CCS. UK law and UK courts only, no cross-border data flow at any layer. The majority of our customers are UK orgs where in-country processing is a hard requirement such as UK healthcare, legal and education companies.
You need to be flaunting your sovereignity, not merely wielding it.
Lack of links.
It's a common annoyance when subsections of a site fail to link back to the parent.
Don't think you'd have much luck convincing say a German that they shouldn't use Mistral because it isn't German sovereign. But you might have luck with that line against china or america.
Or put differently depends more on the fault lines in public perception than strict borders
Some people might interpret this comment as political commentary, but it’s actually just the reality of what people are saying and doing.
There’s a lot of data to suggest that America’s recent policy of reducing its soft power around the World & decoupling itself from alignment with interests of allies is causing increased interest and prioritisation of sovereign capability across tech, defence, public health and policy programs.
This was a campaign strategy/promise for the US President. I’m not going to comment on whether it’s good for the US or for the allies, but I will note it could have been better anticipated by all: the only real surprise is the speed and depth.
It raises some interesting questions - it’s one thing to say you don’t want Microsoft or Starlink in your infra tech stack, or don’t want to use AWS or GCP, but where does the line stop? Does the UK get out of Trident? Does the UN General Assembly get out of New York? No idea, but the fact these are conversations probably happening right now is remarkable.
I don't remember seeing "if you elect me I'll destroy NATO, threaten allies, and make sure even USA's oldest allies hate us" as part of the campaign.
Perhaps you could link that promise from the time before the election?
As to your questions, I think people are hoping that rule of law returns and there is an outbreak of common sense. No-one really expected US president will align with Russia and a cult of pseudo-Christian white-supremacist nationalists will worship him as the second coming as an expectation. That the Senate, SC, and tech leaders have fallen in place behind that (the latter literally paying fealty to their god-king) is complete insanity.
I think it's completely expected that the Senate Republicans would do what they were told, and the multi-decade project to stack the Supreme Court with extremists to overthrow Roe v. Wade was something that was very obvious while it was happening.
I would like to remind you of Project 2025. While Trump claimed to know nothing about it prior to being elected, so far he's appointed every editor/contributor to the document/project to his administration and achieved more than half of the stated goals of the document.
I'm sorry but everyone who was paying attention expected exactly that.
[1]: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/11/19/n...
pypi.org/project/relax is abandoned library, which owner registered via email with expired custom domain, so you can claim this domain and reset owner's account by email.
The UK it seems has dropped the ball on the whole training and building models part, although we are punching up in other areas now.
We really need to get our own equivalent to Mistral, and fast!
BTW don’t see opencode in the docs yet much less known tools are?
come on now
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBBB-m9peMQ
If I can run those models on my consumer hardware, I'd better believe they are 80% cheaper than the models that need 1 TB of RAM.
Input Price: £1.17 Output Price: £2.33
So, slightly cheaper than Fireworks AI
You could have bought languagemodels.co.uk off me and used that!
And more generally, let the AI do the thinking/coding/whatever... Just relax until it's ready.
I will say, I find it interesting that the world relax has such a negative connotation in your mind.
Anyhow, Is it the best name ever? No.
Is it a hell of a lot better than languagemodels.co.uk? 1000%.
this is a joke, right?
Can the user choose which sovereign is doing the computation?
I'd personally prefer not to have the weird uncle do the computation, maybe the younger ones living abroad can do it.
;)
The server is under the woolsack!
I have no idea why you got downvoted so much.
We built a UK sovereign inference provider for developers who are either paying too much for OpenAI/Claude tokens or can't use US hyperscalers due to data residency requirements.
The short version: drop-in OpenAI-compatible API, latest open source models (Kimi K2.6, DeepSeek V4 Pro, Nemotron 3 Super, GPT OSS 120b), running on NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs in the UK. Zero code changes to switch from OpenAI. Up to 80% cheaper per token cost saving!
We built it on fully UK sovereign cloud infrastructure, so data never leaves UK jurisdiction. For anyone building in regulated sectors — finance, legal, health, defence — that matters a lot. But honestly, most of our early users just came for the huge cost savings.
We're looking for developers to kick the tyres. Check out our API docs at relax.ai/docs. I'd love your feedback and happy to answer any questions.
Secondly: I get that 'sovereign' is probably an important sales term for your company. But this, in common with the government's 'sov/ai' fund, does not deserve to be described as sovereign. This is other countries' models served on chips designed and manufactured abroad, powered by a grid which imports 44% of its power.
Of course this isn't your company's fault. Last week I went to an event where the sovereignai.gov.uk people presented. In a very Keir Starmer way (spiritually, he wasn't there), they said in as many words 'oh but I'm sure all reasonable people would agree _really_ sovereign AI would be too hard. So let's all agree to pretend that just popping a bit more money into the AI startup ecosystem is a sovereign AI strategy'.
I'm unsure if the UK does need to be sovereign in anything; it certainly doesn't seem to want to be. But I will continue to poke fun at anything using the pompous phrase 'sovereign' for anything that isn't.
If sovereign AI is a problem you're in earnest about, I hope you go after it seriously, and fix the rest of the stack. I'll cheer you on!
If it were somehow legal for a company to provide MS Office (not a clone) fully in the UK with no control from Microsoft, that would also count as a sovereign capability, even though none of the code was written in the uk.
Maybe that's not how you like the term to be used but it's widely used that way and widely understood.
OK, fair enough on 'pull the plug ~instantly'. But models and chips age fast. If another country can stop you getting new models and chips, this means you're sovereign in state-of-the-art AI for only a window of a year or two (maybe this will widen if model progress tails off).
If it is a short window, strategically, that doesn't seem worth much given the timelines of: a) inter-state conflict, or trade wars b) cold-start time to be able to make your own models and chips
> Maybe that's not how you like the term to be used but it's widely used that way and widely understood.
Noted. But as a data-point, the audience at the event I mentioned (various AI builders and founders) made it clear from their questions to the speaker that the 'sovereign' that sov/ai was aiming at was hollow, for exactly the reasons I've stated.
Gell-Mann suggests I should treat the rest of your post with skepticism.
EDIT: maybe you meant the UK total primary energy? I feel like that's extending the boundary a bit far. Should we start digging for uranium? Or stick to renewables, but only with locally sourced silica and rare earths?
> EDIT: maybe you meant the UK total primary energy? I feel like that's extending the boundary a bit far.
If we're talking about 'sovereign', is it too far? If you read the history of any conflict in the modern era, hot or cold, why is it not important to consider import dependency? What's the plan: tell your opponent it's not fair to disrupt your gas imports?
"We may share personal information to third parties outside of the UK"
"to find out how long your information is being retained, please see 'additional information'". Additional information is an email address.
https://relax.ai/terms-of-service
non-committal will not share customer data "except[...]with the consent of the Customer". 'see DPA'. there is no DPA on this page.
otherwise,
my use on novita with zero data retention [in, out, cache]: [65.9, 2.4, 424.6][1.74, 3.48, 0.13] = $178.22
i couldn't see cache price on relax, so [65.9, 2.4, 424.6][1.17, 2.33, 1.17] = 579.48gbp = $774.45
I assume UK based DCs, so why not just say that, UK based LLM inference.
Is it a DC owned/ran by HM Gov? Is that why it's sovereign?
Not a criticism, more of a critique.
I do see the value in this as some enterprises need local data residency, the UK energy grid realistically can't handle new multi GW xAI-style data centres, and many applications don't need frontier models (but do need more than small local ones).
Token prices should be in $ as that's how our brains work
Converting once, at the time you pick a provider, is trivial compared to having to continuously think about it as you're paying them.
Just to pick on one thing, do you think incitement to murder people by setting fire to hotels, acts that subsequently happened, should just be shrugged at?