Good morning from the Financial Times.
Today is Monday, July 6th, and this is your FT News briefing.
We are doing something a little different today because our staff is off for the July 4th holiday here in the States.
So as you know, the 4th of July celebrates America's independence from the British 250 years ago.
And today, the UK is working on its own independence movement to free itself from America's big tech companies.
We're going to dedicate the whole show today to exploring how that's going.
I'm Mark Filippino, and here's the news you need to start your day.
The tech industry is having a bit of a renaissance in London.
It's home to the main foreign outposts for giants like Google
and Meta, not to mention their very well-funded AI challengers like OpenAI and Anthropic.
The thing is, all the companies I just mentioned are American.
Britain's big AI success story, DeepMind, was acquired by Google in 2014. Now,
though, there's a push to launch a homegrown competitor so the UK can have more sovereignty over its tech.
Here to tell us more is the FT's global tech correspondent, Tim Bradshaw.
Hi, Tim.
Hey, Mark.
So before we get into the London tech renaissance I mentioned, let's go back to the sale of DeepMind,
which a lot of people consider the original sin.
Walk us through what happened there.
Google bought DeepMind back in 2014 for, I think, somewhere around 400 million pounds.