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Multibillion-pound contract to build three small modular reactors was signed with government body in April

Rolls-Royce is facing mounting criticism from politicians and industry figures for a decision to outsource the core parts of a multibillion-pound UK government plan for three small nuclear reactors to South Korea. 

The announcement by the British engineering giant, the lead investor in a consortium developing the reactors, has raised questions about whether the government’s target of 70 per cent of the project being British-made will be met.

Rolls-Royce SMR’s selection of South Korea’s Doosan Enerbility to finalise designs for key components for the small nuclear reactors has triggered warnings from industry representatives that the UK is squandering a chance to build its own supply chain for the technology.

Liam Byrne, Labour MP and chair of parliament’s business and trade committee, said he would be writing to ministers seeking clarification as to how Rolls-Royce’s announcement is compatible with the 70 per cent target.

“This decision raises serious questions about whether the government has a credible plan to turn its commitment to ‘Buy British’ into reality,” he said. “If taxpayers are helping fund a new strategic industry, we need to understand why key contracts are going overseas and what steps are being taken to build British capability for the future.”

Last week’s announcement by Rolls-Royce SMR came just two days after chancellor Rachel Reeves had written to ministers urging them to “buy British” by awarding more government contracts to domestic companies in sectors including steel and energy infrastructure.

Gareth Stace, director-general of UK Steel, said the decision was “extremely disappointing” and at odds with the government’s own industrial strategy aimed at supporting British industry, energy security and supply chain resilience. 

“The UK’s nuclear renaissance should be an opportunity to create jobs, investment and industrial capability here in Britain. It cannot simply become a vehicle for taking public money and then exporting the economic value overseas,” he added.

The contract for Rolls-Royce SMR to build three small modular reactors (SMRs) at Wylfa in North Wales was signed in April with UK government body Great British Energy as part of a plan to invest £2.6bn in the technology over the course of the parliament. 

The UK’s National Wealth Fund, a government-backed policy bank that promises to “unlock Britain’s future”, is also committing up to £599mn to Rolls-Royce SMR to support the development of its small modular reactors. 

Industry insiders said they had hoped that the group would invest in fabricating the new reactors in the UK, with inputs from British companies such as Sheffield Forgemasters, which was nationalised in 2021 to preserve the UK nuclear-submarine build capability.

Instead, critics said they feared the announcement by Rolls-Royce SMR means that core elements of the “nuclear islands” — described as the equivalent to the engines in a car — are now likely to be built in South Korea, leaving UK suppliers to produce lower-value components.

Under the agreement announced last week, Doosan and Škoda will undertake early production work for key components of the nuclear islands, including for the reactor pressure vessels.

Doosan is a global leader in nuclear power equipment and produces entire reactor vessels. Sheffield Forgemasters produces forgings which are a component in the vessels.

A person close to Forgemasters said it was a “perverse outcome” that the UK government should invest over £500mn in saving the strategically important facility, only to see it being marginalised in the UK’s own SMR supply chain.

Before winning the contract, Rolls-Royce SMR told MPs on parliament’s Energy Security & Net Zero Committee in February last year that it was “unashamedly Team UK” and that “up to 78 per cent” of the reactor could be made in the UK. 

When asked this week, Rolls-Royce SMR declined to comment on what proportion of content would be made in the UK under current plans, saying only that “88 per cent of our spend since the business was established [in 2021] has been with UK-based businesses — hundreds of millions of pounds”.  

Governments are backing SMRs, which are smaller than the conventional gigawatt-scale plants that have been built around the world, to provide a reliable source of electricity to meet rising demand without carbon emissions. 

The International Energy Agency has estimated that over 1,000 SMRs could be built by 2050, with cumulative investment of more than $670bn in the sector. 

The situation has echoes of the UK’s failure to develop a stronger position in wind turbine manufacturing despite having the largest offshore wind market outside China. The UK does not have a national wind turbine maker, relying heavily on imports. 

Professor Keith Ridgway, who founded the UK’s Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre, said the UK, with its existing capabilities in nuclear submarine manufacturing in cities like Sheffield, was “perfectly placed” to be a world leader in SMRs.

South Yorkshire mayor Oliver Coppard said the Sheffield region, including Forgemasters and the University of Sheffield’s Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre, already had the foundations of a globally competitive SMR cluster.

“If key parts of production are moved overseas at this stage, there’s a real risk we miss a once‑in‑a-generation opportunity,” he added.

Rolls-Royce SMR said the company would “procure over 40 million components for each SMR” and it was “committed to maximising UK content for our first project, alongside Great British Energy — Nuclear, where competitive capability exists”. 

The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero said it was looking to “unlock a golden age” of nuclear power that would create thousands of jobs across the UK.

“Great British Energy — Nuclear’s ambition is that 70 per cent of supply chain products are British-built across the small modular reactor fleet,” a spokesperson added.

The billionaire co-founder of Databricks and Perplexity AI, Andy Konwinski, is singularly focused on plugging the years-long drain of talent from academia to Big Tech.

He wants to encourage academics to focus on publishing more openly available research, a reaction to the move by frontier AI companies to reduce the amount of AI research they publish as they race against one another to develop the best models and AI tools.

While Google, in particular, has long been known for its research publishing, a 2026 Stanford report noted that OpenAI, Anthropic and Google no longer disclose details about the software used to train their AI models, how much computing power they used, and the size of their training datasets — crucial points that could help researchers replicate the companies’ successes.

“There are many reasons—like fundamental, societal-level, defend-democracy reasons—that open research needs to survive,” Konwinski told me at the Association for Computing Machinery’s AI conference in San Jose. He pointed to a well-known Google research paper from 2017 that would later become the basis of today’s most popular AI models and chatbots.

Now, he said, there is an “aging generation of luminaries” that aren’t publishing research externally or sticking around in academia to “train up their replacement,” meaning there could be a future scarcity of AI talent, just as artificial intelligence technologies become more complex and crucial to national security.

Konwinski in June 2025 co-founded Laude Institute, a kind of Y Combinator for academic and research types with big ideas for breakthroughs in AI research. Laude Institute, which Konwinski put $100 million into, currently funds about 70 projects through grants of up to $10 million. One such project was Terminal-Bench, a collection of AI benchmarking tools created by researchers from Stanford and Laude Institute that’s become an industry standard for evaluating AI coding tools.

Another is Stanford’s Marin project, which is focused on coming up with more efficient, predictable ways to pre-train open source models that perform on par with frontier ones at a fraction of the cost by requiring fewer AI chips or fewer “runs” or rounds of training.

Konwinski said he chats with about one dozen PhD students every month from the top 20 universities in North America, with a particular focus on Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, and Carnegie Mellon. His pitch to them: Stay in academia as a PhD student, even if that means making less than $100,000 annually for a few years, rather than accepting a $1 million to $3 million compensation package from a tech firm. If they do that, and publish openly, Laude will fund their research so they can share technology breakthroughs with the world. Eventually, you’ll get offers for tens of millions of dollars from the same companies, he tells them.

“I can get you [researchers] to fifty million. I can get you to a hundred million,” he said. “The value you have is in your ability to make the breakthrough.”

Konwinski said he’s fighting an uphill battle as AI talent wars send compensation packages through the roof: “The trade-off‘s just getting so much harder ’cause people are having to say no to salaries that are unprecedented.”

Academia also has problems getting adequate resources to produce AI models. Universities used to need up to a $10 million budget for large AI research projects but the cost has soared to around $100 million in some cases, given the expenses linked to costly AI chips, Konwinski said.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, for instance, thinks universities need $1 billion budgets for AI chips—an issue that Stanford visiting professor Anjney Midha grilled him about during a recorded class lecture last month.

“We are dying out here,” said Midha, referencing the university’s crimped ability to purchase Nvidia’s expensive graphics processing units.

“You don’t have the budget for $1 billion compute,” Huang responded. “You have to find a way to change the way you do budgeting, he said.

Meanwhile, Konwinski is doing what he can to encourage open research despite the challenges. Laude Institute is beginning to accept pledges from other technologists and said it has a commitment from Berkeley professor and Google distinguished engineer Dave Patterson.

He said open research “needs a heavyweight champion in the ring.”

“We're fostering this ecosystem of open research so that I can put forward a heavyweight contender in the arena with the closed labs, the closed models, the closed techniques.”

The report cites an unnamed person familiar with the matter as revealing that Point72 rose 2% in May, bringing year-to-date gains to approximately 10.5%. The result follows a 17.5% return in 2025, during which the firm outperformed several of its closest peers in the multi-strategy hedge fund space, including Millennium Management and Citadel.

Broader industry performance was also positive but more uneven. Millennium Management posted a 2.4% gain for May, lifting its 2026 returns to 6.1%, while Balyasny Asset Management moved into positive territory for the year after a 1.4% monthly gain.

Despite solid results among hedge funds, returns lagged behind broader equity markets, which rallied strongly on continued investor enthusiasm for technology and artificial intelligence-linked stocks. The S&P 500 rose 11% in May, following a gain of more than 5% in the month alone.

Not all managers posted gains. Walleye Capital and North Rock Partners recorded modest losses of 0.9% and 0.2% respectively over the month.

The performance snapshot highlights ongoing dispersion across the hedge fund industry, with multi-strategy platforms continuing to compete closely while navigating a market environment heavily influenced by equity momentum and sector concentration.

Projections by Wall Street bank underpin the $1.78tn valuation group is pitching in IPO

SpaceX’s pitch to achieve a $1.78tn valuation in its initial public offering hinges on revenues at its AI unit surging by around 100 times by 2030, according to projections made by its lead investment bank Goldman Sachs.

Goldman expects revenues from SpaceX’s AI division to rise to $322bn by 2030 from $3.2bn in 2025, according to forecasts discussed by the Wall Street bank with a potential investor in the deal. SpaceX’s total revenue is expected to reach $474bn in 2030 from $18.7bn last year.

The bank’s lofty projections underscore the aggressive bets underpinning the AI investment boom by Big Tech firms that has propelled the US stock market to a series of record highs. Goldman’s model was verbally shared with the investor as SpaceX kicks off its IPO roadshow, in which bankers will seek to sell money managers on a deal that could raise up to $86bn.

The valuation of Elon Musk’s rockets-to-chatbot group rests on an assumption that its AI division xAI — which made a loss of $6.4bn in 2025 — has a total addressable market of $26.5tn, SpaceX’s IPO prospectus shows. That dwarfs the roughly $2tn total addressable market outlined for the group’s Starlink internet service and space operations.

Goldman’s projections show that the Wall Street bank expects revenues at SpaceX’s AI segment to rise 388 per cent to $15.6bn in 2026 compared with the year prior and reach $34.5bn in 2027. The estimates were confirmed by a person familiar with the matter.

SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment. Goldman declined to comment.