Nebius Ties UK Lab Deals to Ending Non-Competes

Nebius has signed compute deals with early-stage UK AI labs and is cheering a plan to loosen non-compete clauses. The Amsterdam-listed AI cloud company is tying that sales push to a hiring thaw that is still only a speech.

Gary Tierney, general manager for EMEA, said the counterparties are in stealth or just out of it. He also said the clauses are “not necessarily been a problem for us,” then pointed at the startup market Nebius sells into, where London labs can raise money and still fail to hire.

The Labs Nebius Will Not Name

Tierney wants the firm to “continue to look to expand” in Britain because of its talent density. “We are working with some really exciting AI labs that are coming out of the UK,” he said, without naming them or putting a value on the contracts.

That gap is the whole commercial point. A neocloud makes money when new model shops need rented GPUs. The labs that would fill the UK halls are, on his account, still forming in the shadow of DeepMind, Google, Microsoft and the other shops that can write long restraints into contracts.

WHAT WE KNOW

• The customers: Early-stage UK AI labs, in stealth or just out of stealth, have signed compute deals with Nebius.
• The pitch: London is the company’s main European research and go-to-market hub, and Tierney is still shopping for more UK capacity.
• The policy ask: He welcomed a government plan to ease non-compete clauses because, he said, those clauses stop funded labs from hiring in London.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• The names: Nebius has not said which labs signed, or whether any of this year’s public spin-outs are on the list.
• The size: No contract value, GPU count or term has been disclosed.
• The sites: There is no public map of which of the four UK campuses will host the new workloads.

The unnamed book sits beside named UK work that is already live. Revolut rebuilt its AI stack on Nebius. Prima Mente trains biological foundation models on the same platform. Those accounts prove that British firms will rent local GPUs. They do not prove that a wave of frontier labs is about to walk in.

Four UK Sites and a 65 MW Target

On 8 June 2026, Nebius said it was investing an approximately £1.7 billion UK build-out ($2.26 billion) across four sites. Three of those are new NVIDIA deployments on top of the company’s first UK deployment of NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra, which went live in November 2025. Combined, the deployments are due to reach 65 MW when fully ramped in 2027.

Nebius has announced an investment of £1.7 billion to build out capacity in the UK with three new deployments of NVIDIA infrastructure.

The three new sites will deploy the latest generations of NVIDIA’s full-stack, end-to-end AI factory platform technology and combined will…

— Nebius (@nebiusai) June 8, 2026

Arkady Volozh, founder and CEO, said the UK is “one of the places where AI is being built, deployed, and adopted at the same time,” and that “we are also here for the long run.” Kanishka Narayan, the UK AI minister, tied the spend to the government’s AI Opportunities Action Plan and to domestic training and inference for companies, researchers and public services.

THE UK FOOTPRINT NEBIUS HAS PUT ON THE RECORD

Nebius is listed on Nasdaq as NBIS and is headquartered in Amsterdam, with its own data centres in Finland and France. The UK plan is a local slice of a much larger hyperscaler book: Microsoft took about $17.4 billion of dedicated capacity, and Meta added $12 billion of dedicated capacity from early 2027, with up to $15 billion more if that extra kit stays unsold to anyone else. Small UK labs will not replace those cheques. They are a different customer class, the one Tierney says still cannot staff itself.

Revolut and Prima Mente Already Rent the GPUs

The June release named the British work that is already in production. Revolut, the London-founded fintech with more than 75 million customers in 40 markets, runs FinCrime agents and a chat orchestrator on Nebius Token Factory, handling more than a million customer support tickets each month. Pavel Nesterov, Revolut’s executive director of AI, said the company rebuilt its stack “around production reliability and inference economics.”

Prima Mente, backed through the UK Sovereign AI Fund, trains and serves biological foundation models for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s work on the same cloud. That is the scientific tenant, not a stealth frontier lab, and it is the one Nebius chose to put on the record.

Training multi-billion parameter biological foundation models needs sustained, local infrastructure. Nebius’s expansion in the UK means we can run more experiments, more reliably, and move treatments for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s into the pipeline faster.

Ravi Solanki, founder and CEO of Prima Mente, Nebius UK expansion release

Nebius is also hiring engineering and research staff in Britain to sit alongside EMEA commercial teams in London, and Nebius Academy is lining up university partnerships. Tierney’s own hiring pipeline, on his telling, is not the bottleneck. The bottleneck is the labs he wants as tenants.

Non-Compete Clauses Still Freeze London Hiring

On 9 October 2026 at the Innovation Nation Summit in Manchester, Prime Minister Andy Burnham said the government “will legislate to make sure that non-compete clauses will no longer be a barrier to hiring for our most promising startups and scaling firms.” He called some firms’ use of the clauses a drag on innovation and compared the intended shift to football’s Bosman ruling. No bill has been published. Existing contracts have not changed.

A Department for Business and Trade working paper, issued on 26 November 2025, put numbers under that speech. It said around 5 million employees in Great Britain work under a non-compete, with a typical duration of around 6 months. Research by the London School of Economics that the paper cites found around 26% of workers subject to them, a higher share than in comparable US and European surveys. The Competition and Markets Authority work cited in the same paper found that 20 to 30% of workers in lower-paid jobs believe they are covered.

THE CLAUSES THE GPU LANDLORD WANTS LIFTED

• Headcount: About 5 million employees in Great Britain have a non-compete in their contract.
• Duration: The typical term is around 6 months, and some last much longer.
• Share: LSE work put coverage at around 26% of workers, above US and European survey levels.
• Low pay: CMA research found 20 to 30% of workers in lower-paid jobs believe they are covered.

The paper asked for views on four routes, and responses closed on 18 February 2026. Ministers have not said which route they will take.

THE FOUR OPTIONS STILL ON THE TABLE

• A time cap: A statutory limit on how long a non-compete can run.
• A full ban: Making the clauses unenforceable in employment contracts.
• A pay floor: Banning them below a salary threshold.
• A mix: Combining a ban below a threshold with a statutory limit above it.

Banks, hedge funds and consultancies have already pressed for a partial curb rather than a wipeout, arguing that client lists and deal teams still need some post-employment restraint. That fight is about the City. Tierney’s fight is about whether a 20-person lab can hire a researcher who is still on gardening leave from an incumbent.

Here, now with so much great talent appearing and being able to raise funds but they can’t attract talent in London, because of this non-compete, if that goes away, I think you are going to see an emergence of a lot more labs, a lot more frontier builders here in the UK.

Gary Tierney, general manager, EMEA, Nebius

He compared that freeze with the United States, where he said the absence of the same restraint lets the startup market “mov[e] way quicker.” The US Federal Trade Commission, in the 2024 rule the UK paper cites, estimated a federal ban would mean 8,500 more new businesses a year, a 2.7% rise. Nebius does not need 8,500 UK labs. It needs enough new ones to keep 65 MW of British GPUs busy once the hyperscaler halls are spoken for.

Local Pushback Has Not Slowed the Spending

Asked about public anger at UK data centres, Tierney said, “I don’t think that is ever a reason for us not to invest in a region,” and pointed at the money already committed. The anger is real, and it is not aimed at Nebius by name.

On 10 October 2026 about 300 people rallied in Caernarfon against a 450 MW campus beside the Menai Strait, a scheme that is not a Nebius project. A petition against it passed 22,500 signatures. Natural Resources Wales has objected over landscape harm, and Dŵr Cymru Welsh Water has put in a holding objection on sewerage and cooling detail. In Scotland, the Chapelcross hyperscale plan drew more than 1,000 objections in 48 hours. In north Devon, campaigners have tried to halt a separate giant campus on water, noise and landscape grounds.

Nebius’s own Welsh move is the Vantage lease at Newport in the South Wales AI Growth Zone, announced on 13 August 2026, a much smaller high-density hall rather than a 450 MW waterfront campus. Harlow’s 22 MW sits inside an existing data-centre park. The political risk is still the same shape: power, water and consent arrive slower than term sheets. A landlord that has already sold Microsoft and Meta capacity cannot treat local planning as a footnote, even if the UK cheques have been written.

Ineffable Intelligence Signed With Google Cloud

The labs that came out of stealth in 2026 are the market Tierney is describing, and the one famous example has already chosen someone else. Ineffable Intelligence, founded in London by David Silver, the former DeepMind researcher behind AlphaGo, emerged with a $1.1 billion seed round that valued the company at $5.1 billion. It named Google Cloud as its preferred cloud partner. Recursive Superintelligence, co-founded by computer scientist Richard Socher, and Inherent, founded by former DeepMind, Microsoft and White House staff, are the other public examples from the same cohort. None of them has been identified as a Nebius customer.

That split is what the unnamed deals are trying to close. The labs with nine-figure rounds can buy from Google or Amazon. The next tier, still in stealth, is the one that needs a European AI cloud and, on Tierney’s account, still cannot pull people out of incumbents. If the non-compete thaw never arrives, Nebius is left with Revolut-style enterprise inference and a few life-science models, not a dense cluster of frontier builders sitting on the 65 MW.

Silver’s lab is a useful measure of the talent the clauses are holding. He left DeepMind to build a “superlearner” that trains from experience rather than from scraped text, and he has talked about a three-year path to the kind of system he wants. Labs like that hire from a small pool. Six-month restraints, and the fear of a High Court bill even when a clause would not stand up, keep that pool off the market.

Burnham’s Pledge Still Has No Legal Text

The compute deals are signed, on Nebius’s word. The labour-law change that would multiply the number of labs is not. Further detail is expected around the 28 October 2026 Budget, including a timetable for looking at long notice periods and garden leave. Until a draft clause exists, every new UK lab still has to hire around the old restraints.

THE NON-COMPETE FILE SO FAR

1. 26 November 2025: The Department for Business and Trade issues a working paper on four options for reform.
2. 18 February 2026: The response window closes, with no chosen option published afterwards.
3. 9 October 2026: Burnham pledges legislation so non-competes stop blocking hiring at start-ups and scale-ups.
4. 28 October 2026: The Budget is due to carry more detail, still as a plan rather than as enacted law.

Nebius can keep signing stealth labs in the meantime, and it can keep pouring NVIDIA kit into Harlow, Newport and the unnamed fourth hall. The demand thesis Tierney spelled out only pays if those labs can hire the people who currently cannot leave. The GPUs will be in Britain either way. The question the unnamed contracts do not answer is how many new names will be around to rent them once the speech becomes a statute, or if it never does.