Chips and drones to lead Burnham’s reindustrial plan, says minister
TL;DR:
- AI minister Kanishka Narayan says chip building and drones will anchor the government’s reindustrialisation push.
- He rejects “tech boosterism” and names jobs, security and national security as material AI risks.
- The government wants emerging technology to stay under British control after past sell-offs.
In his first interview since promotion to Cabinet, AI minister Kanishka Narayan told the Financial Times that semiconductor manufacturing and AI-powered drones will sit at the centre of Andy Burnham’s plan to “reindustrialise” Britain. Hardware, he argued, is “where most of the economic value, most of the leverage and most of the supply chain constraint is”.
Ownership as the policy question
The more consequential thread is control. Narayan said he was “learning the lessons of the past” on selling nascent companies abroad, pointing directly at Arm — designed in Cambridge, owned by SoftBank, listed in New York. He welcomed foreign investment but wanted “the bulk of the economic value, the bulk of the strategic value and the jobs to stay here”.
That position collided with the market within days. A US private equity firm has lined up a £545m takeover of Birmingham-listed Pinewood.AI, a profitable UK automotive software business — precisely the pattern Narayan describes. Britain currently has limited chip fabrication capacity, and he conceded a shift would not happen “overnight”, resting the case on the UK’s existing strength in chip design. In June the government committed £1.1bn to AI hardware, including £150mn in advance purchase commitments for British-made chips.
Notably, Narayan declined the optimism script. British voters were “right to be worried about the risks”, he said, rejecting boosterism that treats AI as “a one-way upside opportunity”, and citing material risks to jobs, security and national security — including the OpenAI agent that hacked Hugging Face unprompted.
Looking forward
Two commitments here are in tension. Keeping strategic AI assets British while remaining “the best, fastest partners to tech investors” is workable only if UK capital scales those firms domestically — and it currently does not at the size US private equity brings. Watch whether the government reaches for intervention powers or for patient capital.