UK sovereign LLM inference
relax.ai
relax.ai
We built a UK sovereign inference provider for developers who are either paying too much for OpenAI/Claude tokens or can't use US hyperscalers due to data residency requirements.
The short version: drop-in OpenAI-compatible API, latest open source models (Kimi K2.6, DeepSeek V4 Pro, Nemotron 3 Super, GPT OSS 120b), running on NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs in the UK. Zero code changes to switch from OpenAI. Up to 80% cheaper per token cost saving!
We built it on fully UK sovereign cloud infrastructure, so data never leaves UK jurisdiction. For anyone building in regulated sectors — finance, legal, health, defence — that matters a lot. But honestly, most of our early users just came for the huge cost savings.
We're looking for developers to kick the tyres. Check out our API docs at relax.ai/docs. I'd love your feedback and happy to answer any questions.
I do see the value in this as some enterprises need local data residency, the UK energy grid realistically can't handle new multi GW xAI-style data centres, and many applications don't need frontier models (but do need more than small local ones).
I assume UK based DCs, so why not just say that, UK based LLM inference.
Is it a DC owned/ran by HM Gov? Is that why it's sovereign?
Not a criticism, more of a critique.
Secondly: I get that 'sovereign' is probably an important sales term for your company. But this, in common with the government's 'sov/ai' fund, does not deserve to be described as sovereign. This is other countries' models served on chips designed and manufactured abroad, powered by a grid which imports 44% of its power.
Of course this isn't your company's fault. Last week I went to an event where the sovereignai.gov.uk people presented. In a very Keir Starmer way (spiritually, he wasn't there), they said in as many words 'oh but I'm sure all reasonable people would agree _really_ sovereign AI would be too hard. So let's all agree to pretend that just popping a bit more money into the AI startup ecosystem is a sovereign AI strategy'.
I'm unsure if the UK does need to be sovereign in anything; it certainly doesn't seem to want to be. But I will continue to poke fun at anything using the pompous phrase 'sovereign' for anything that isn't.
If sovereign AI is a problem you're in earnest about, I hope you go after it seriously, and fix the rest of the stack. I'll cheer you on!
If it were somehow legal for a company to provide MS Office (not a clone) fully in the UK with no control from Microsoft, that would also count as a sovereign capability, even though none of the code was written in the uk.
Maybe that's not how you like the term to be used but it's widely used that way and widely understood.
OK, fair enough on 'pull the plug ~instantly'. But models and chips age fast. If another country can stop you getting new models and chips, this means you're sovereign in state-of-the-art AI for only a window of a year or two (maybe this will widen if model progress tails off).
If it is a short window, strategically, that doesn't seem worth much given the timelines of: a) inter-state conflict, or trade wars b) cold-start time to be able to make your own models and chips
> Maybe that's not how you like the term to be used but it's widely used that way and widely understood.
Noted. But as a data-point, the audience at the event I mentioned (various AI builders and founders) made it clear from their questions to the speaker that the 'sovereign' that sov/ai was aiming at was hollow, for exactly the reasons I've stated.
OK, that's a fair point.
Gell-Mann suggests I should treat the rest of your post with skepticism.
EDIT: maybe you meant the UK total primary energy? I feel like that's extending the boundary a bit far. Should we start digging for uranium? Or stick to renewables, but only with locally sourced silica and rare earths?
> EDIT: maybe you meant the UK total primary energy? I feel like that's extending the boundary a bit far.
If we're talking about 'sovereign', is it too far? I think the history of conflict in the modern era, hot and cold, shows that your rivals' ability to disrupt your energy imports matters a lot.
"We may share personal information to third parties outside of the UK"
"to find out how long your information is being retained, please see 'additional information'". Additional information is an email address.
https://relax.ai/terms-of-service
non-committal will not share customer data "except[...]with the consent of the Customer". 'see DPA'. there is no DPA on this page.
otherwise,
my use on novita with zero data retention [in, out, cache]: [65.9, 2.4, 424.6][1.74, 3.48, 0.13] = $178.22
i couldn't see cache price on relax, so [65.9, 2.4, 424.6][1.17, 2.33, 1.17] = 579.48gbp = $774.45
On the policy: you’re right, that wording is too loose for what we actually do. The inference path is UK-only - no model inference, no prompt or response data, leaves UK jurisdiction.
The “third parties outside the UK” language covers things like payment processing and standard SaaS sub-processors, not customer inference data, and it should say that. We'll be re-writing this next week!
Lack of links.
It's a common annoyance when subsections of a site fail to link back to the parent.
We spun out in 2026 to focus on sovereign inference and UK workloads that need in-country processing. UK-resident founders. Not a UK subsidiary of a foreign hyperscaler or model provider — wholly UK-owned and operated, running in Civo’s LON1 datacentre.
ICO-registered, NCSC-aligned, on G-Cloud via CCS. UK law and UK courts only, no cross-border data flow at any layer. The majority of our customers are UK orgs where in-country processing is a hard requirement such as UK healthcare, legal and education companies.
You need to be flaunting your sovereignity, not merely wielding it.
The UK it seems has dropped the ball on the whole training and building models part, although we are punching up in other areas now.
We really need to get our own equivalent to Mistral, and fast!
Some people might interpret this comment as political commentary, but it’s actually just the reality of what people are saying and doing.
There’s a lot of data to suggest that America’s recent policy of reducing its soft power around the World & decoupling itself from alignment with interests of allies is causing increased interest and prioritisation of sovereign capability across tech, defence, public health and policy programs.
This was a campaign strategy/promise for the US President. I’m not going to comment on whether it’s good for the US or for the allies, but I will note it could have been better anticipated by all: the only real surprise is the speed and depth.
It raises some interesting questions - it’s one thing to say you don’t want Microsoft or Starlink in your infra tech stack, or don’t want to use AWS or GCP, but where does the line stop? Does the UK get out of Trident? Does the UN General Assembly get out of New York? No idea, but the fact these are conversations probably happening right now is remarkable.
I don't remember seeing "if you elect me I'll destroy NATO, threaten allies, and make sure even USA's oldest allies hate us" as part of the campaign.
Perhaps you could link that promise from the time before the election?
As to your questions, I think people are hoping that rule of law returns and there is an outbreak of common sense. No-one really expected US president will align with Russia and a cult of pseudo-Christian white-supremacist nationalists will worship him as the second coming as an expectation. That the Senate, SC, and tech leaders have fallen in place behind that (the latter literally paying fealty to their god-king) is complete insanity.
I'm sorry but everyone who was paying attention expected exactly that.
I think it's completely expected that the Senate Republicans would do what they were told, and the multi-decade project to stack the Supreme Court with extremists to overthrow Roe v. Wade was something that was very obvious while it was happening.
I would like to remind you of Project 2025. While Trump claimed to know nothing about it prior to being elected, so far he's appointed every editor/contributor to the document/project to his administration and achieved more than half of the stated goals of the document.
You weren’t paying attention, or spent to much time in wrong echo chamber.
QAnon happened during Trump's first term. The support for Trump by the alt-right and white supremacists were so well known they were written about in the mainstream media.
Trump's links with Russia have been well known for decades. He literally started his construction business doing deals with the Russian mob.
Hell, even Trump's sexual abuse issues were right there for everyone to see. "Grab'em by the pussy" would have ended anyone else's entire political career, it just made Trump more popular.
>That the Senate, SC, and tech leaders have fallen in place behind that (the latter literally paying fealty to their god-king) is complete insanity.
Why do you think Trump packed the court with candidates hand-selected by the Federalist Society?
Did people miss the creeping right-wing shift in the Republican Party after 9/11? The ascent of Evangelical Christianity and Christian nationalism? The normalization of authoritarianism and fascism within the Conservative movement has been happening since the days of the John Birch Society. The dark enlightenment shit in SV goes back to Curtis Yarvin in the early 2000s.
All of this was seen coming from miles away.
All of this was warned about.
Shouted about from the rooftops and on the streetcorners.
For years.
No one cared because it was women and gays and people of color, "leftists" and "liberals" doing the warning. They were dismissed as delusional. Americans only trust in the authority of white men, and half the country swept Trump into power specifically because they wanted a white supremacist Christian revolution purging "DEI" and "feminism" and "progressivism" and "secularism" from culture and government. Even Trump's own supporters warned us about their intent. They literally published it in a document, with bullet points and everything, and Americans trusted the white guy with his fingers crossed behind his back - despite being an infamous liar, con-man and holding views that align perfectly with Project 2025 - because the alternative would mean trusting that a "leftist" could be right about something, and having a black woman president. Can't have that. We had a half-black man in the White House who was at best center-right and Americans lost their goddamn minds about him being the Marxist Black Panther Antichrist.
Americans don't get to say they didn't see it coming. This was the most easily telegraphed arc of fascism ever in the history of civilization. The US has been playing it on easy mode and still lost.
Don't think you'd have much luck convincing say a German that they shouldn't use Mistral because it isn't German sovereign. But you might have luck with that line against china or america.
Or put differently depends more on the fault lines in public perception than strict borders
Which goes to show maybe it's less about literal sovereignty than wanting to rely on parties less prone to exploit the reliance for stabbing you in the back.
Considering it took decades of absolutely no meaningful action against the US tech sector's cavalcade of object lessons in 'They "trust me". Dumb fucks', and orgs were still eagerly ripping out homegrown system solutions to get all their communication and storage locked into Azure and AWS at the most four years ago, I'm not sure whether to feel relieved or exasperated that there are some signs of real reactions this time.
[1]: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/11/19/n...
In a very limited way. Some countries are moving some government systems off US suppliers, but its very limited.
Somethings are going the other way. For example (there was a post about this on HN a few days ago) the new EU ID/age verification app depends on Google or Apple attested phones.
There is no real effort to push the private sector off American systems. Your government might technically function but its going to be crippled if your private sector has ground to a standstill.
LLM inference is currently a secondary concern - lots of conversations, some pilots and PoC implementations but not much beyond that (yet). I'd expect that market to grow substantially over the next couple of years, though.
Note that "sovereignty" isn't seen as a binary thing in this context. Rather, organisations are using a risk planning approach: mapping out potential sovereignty concerns, then building strategies to mitigate them. Think of it as the start of a wave that will likely continue to build for the rest of the decade.
Big-bang onshoring operations aren't really on anyone's radar at this stage, but it's great to know that there are more UK-based options are becoming available.
If I can run those models on my consumer hardware, I'd better believe they are 80% cheaper than the models that need 1 TB of RAM.
Input Price: £1.17 Output Price: £2.33
So, slightly cheaper than Fireworks AI
pypi.org/project/relax is abandoned library, which owner registered via email with expired custom domain, so you can claim this domain and reset owner's account by email.
[1] https://peps.python.org/pep-0541/#how-to-request-a-name-tran...
come on now
BTW don’t see opencode in the docs yet much less known tools are?
Can the user choose which sovereign is doing the computation?
I'd personally prefer not to have the weird uncle do the computation, maybe the younger ones living abroad can do it.
;)
The server is under the woolsack!
You could have bought languagemodels.co.uk off me and used that!
this is a joke, right?
And more generally, let the AI do the thinking/coding/whatever... Just relax until it's ready.
I will say, I find it interesting that the world relax has such a negative connotation in your mind.
Anyhow, Is it the best name ever? No.
Is it a hell of a lot better than languagemodels.co.uk? 1000%.
I have no idea why you got downvoted so much.
Token prices should be in $ as that's how our brains work
Converting once, at the time you pick a provider, is trivial compared to having to continuously think about it as you're paying them.
Just to pick on one thing, do you think incitement to murder people by setting fire to hotels, acts that subsequently happened, should just be shrugged at?
First amendment has nothing to do with it.