The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) recently published its final verdict on the state of the cloud industry. While the tone may have softened since its initial findings, the conclusion was still damning: hyperscalers like AWS and Microsoft continue to unfairly dominate the cloud market through opaque, inflated pricing and technical lock-in strategies.

Yet for a verdict that seems so clear-cut, the CMA has so far stopped short of directly intervening. Instead of enforcing interim measures, it has passed the issue on to the Digital Markets Unit (DMU) for further investigation without setting timelines or offering meaningful checks on current behaviour.

This has real consequences on AI accessibility at a time when the UK is counting on AI to inspire a new era of economic growth.

Cloud concentration shapes how, and whether, organisations can access technologies like GenAI. If the same providers control both the infrastructure and the tooling, then data sovereignty and cost control become secondary. What starts out as a convenient choice often leaves businesses tied to infrastructure they can’t afford and that doesn’t protect their data.

While regulators are still figuring out what a fairer cloud market should look like, we’re getting on with building the kind of tools we think should already exist. Tools that are affordable and rooted in user control.

Introducing the relaxAI API

When we talk about Generative AI today, too often it means giving up control; over your data, over your costs, and over where your models are hosted. With the relaxAI API, we set out to change that.

The relaxAI API is an OpenAI-compatible interface that gives developers and organisations a way to integrate powerful open-source models into their applications, without the uncertainty that comes with relying on U.S. hyperscalers. It’s designed to feel familiar to those already building with OpenAI’s tooling, but crucially, it runs on infrastructure you can trust and within a legal and regulatory framework you understand.

With the relaxAI API, you can run high-performance models like Llama 4 Maverick and DeepSeek R1 on infrastructure hosted entirely in the UK. relaxAI is currently the only UK-based API provider offering DeepSeek R1 hosted within UK borders.

👉 Find out more about the release of the relaxAI APIR here.

Why compatibility still matters

There’s no shortage of AI APIs out there. But most demand that you buy into a completely new environment or abandon tools you already rely on.

We took a different route. relaxAI API is OpenAI-compatible by design, so if you’ve already built against that API, switching doesn’t require starting from scratch. It also connects smoothly with more than 20 widely used frameworks and tools, including LangChain, GPT4All, LlamaIndex, and Rasa, so whether you're running a chatbot or fine-tuning embeddings for enterprise search, it works out of the box.

Performance meets price: making sovereign AI accessible

There’s often an assumption, especially from legacy providers, that choosing sovereignty means accepting trade-offs like limited performance or higher costs. We’ve never accepted that premise.

With the relaxAI API, we’ve built a system that is sovereign from the start and affordable. By owning the infrastructure end to end, we’re able to offer one of the most cost-effective options in the UK, starting at £0.10 (input) and £0.60 (output) per million tokens.

Avoiding the lock-in trap

One concern we’ve heard from customers is the return of opaque, restrictive pricing. It’s a dynamic we’ve seen across the industry, particularly as demand for Generative AI has surged and usage-based models have become the norm. For many, this leads to spiralling costs and a sense of lost flexibility.

We’ve taken a different approach - our pricing is straightforward from day one. We’ve removed the unnecessary cost layers that often catch scaling businesses off guard and passed those savings on to our users, so they can focus on innovating with systems that make the most sense for their business.

Why this matters now

There’s been no shortage of speeches about the UK becoming a leader in AI and digital innovation. But at the ground level, the tools available haven’t always reflected that ambition. From inflexible contracts to vague data policies and steep prices, the reality is often more constrained than it looks on paper.

We’ve heard again and again from organisations that they’d like to integrate AI, but only if they can be certain their data stays within jurisdiction and remains under their control.

With relaxAI, we’ve tried to offer exactly that: a local, affordable route into AI, without having to trade off compliance or autonomy.

Of course, relaxAI is GDPR-compliant. It supports end-to-end encryption, multi-factor authentication, and carries certifications like SOC 2, ISO-27001, and Cyber Essentials Plus.

The way organisations think about AI is changing. There’s less appetite for black-box systems and more demand for tools that can be understood and trusted. People want infrastructure they can build around, not just plug into.

If you’ve been holding off on AI because of concerns about privacy, cost, or complexity, there’s now another way in. Explore relaxAI API today: https://relax.ai/api