Locai Labs and Civo unveil ‘Project Mercury,’ the UK’s first family of sovereign frontier models

Today, Civo is proud to announce the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Locai Labs, the UK’s sovereign AI company, to undertake Project Mercury. A programme to build the UK’s first pre-trained, sovereign large language models (LLMs), designed to reclaim British digital autonomy.

For a decade, the UK has operated as a "digital tenant," reliant on foreign-owned hyperscale cloud providers and AI model developers for its most sensitive computational needs. These companies are subject to control from their host nation governments and we have seen how they have been required to remove services from individuals who have criticised these governments. The Mercury Series aims to end this dependency. This partnership proves that the UK possesses the talent, the infrastructure, and the vision to develop, train, and host frontier-level AI entirely on home soil.

By providing a domestic alternative to foreign infrastructure and AI, Mercury reduces the geopolitical vulnerabilities associated with overseas-controlled data centres and AI models and ensures that British data and the use of AI by UK citizens stays under British jurisdiction.

 The Mercury Series will be a family of LLMs engineered to meet the stringent security, residency, and compliance requirements of both the public and private sectors. From the secure digitisation of public sector services to providing a competitive edge for private sector enterprises in finance, healthcare, and engineering, Mercury aims to offer “Total Sovereignty” with a scalable solution for every workload. These new models will be available from Civo Sovereign Cloud resident in the UK or deployed and hosted on-premise within an enterprise’s own IT infrastructure.

The series will feature a range of models built and trained entirely in the UK:

●  Edge Intelligence: Efficient 0.8-30 billion-parameter models designed for local, low-latency applications.

●  Frontier Power: 256 billion-parameter models capable of handling the most complex generative AI tasks.

This collaboration arrives as the UK government accelerates its investment in domestic AI through the £500 million Sovereign AI Fund. The Mercury Series is the direct answer to the national goal of making the UK a maker of AI rather than just a taker of AI developed elsewhere. Furthermore, the Mercury Series will be developed using 100% renewable energy, proving that the future of British AI is as sustainable as it is powerful.