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UK sovereign LLM inference
- benjamintnorris 5mo agoHi HN, I'm Ben, founding engineer at relaxAI. 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.
- jstummbillig 5mo agoHey Ben. I find communication like this fairly off-putting. In so far the 80% cheaper per token (or any part of it) is something of your own making/ingenuity, by all means, do tell, but it requires comparing token cost fairly with comparable models on i.e. OpenRouter and not across different models and pretending it's the same thing.
- benjamintnorris 5mo agoHi jstummbillig, I appreciate the feedback. We’re careful to state only that users can expect up to an 80% cost reduction when switching away from OpenAI. Our DeepSeek V4 Pro model is a good example of this.
- graemep 5mo agoSo the pricing is 12.50/month for unlimited chat, or 60p per million tokens output/10p per million input? For use with a coding assistant it would be the latter?
- spacebanana7 5mo agoIs your business plan essentially to run mid tier models on hardware in the UK? 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).
- hathym 5mo agowhy use this over openrouter?
- imdsm 5mo agogood question, it's going to take a lot to dislodge openrouter from my workflows
- nicce 5mo agoAvoiding routing through US or US-based companies.
- raesene9 5mo agoI'd expect for workflows where there is value in knowing that the data is processed in the UK. From a contractual/data protection standpoint, that could be very useful, depending on the use case.
- bocytron 5mo agoopenrouter is an US based company, so falls under CLOUD Act
- imdsm 5mo agoMarketing aside, why are you using the term "UK sovereign"? 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.
- drawfloat 5mo agoMuch the same way the word "patriotism" is more common in US national discourse, "sovereignty" is very common in UK national discourse.
- bcjdjsndon 5mo agoYou're thinking of when chavs used to wear sovereign rings... it's fell out of fashion now tbh
- StilesCrisis 5mo agoHe does say that? "running on NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs in the UK" is in there and that's pretty unambiguous.
- pu_pe 5mo agoThe problem is if those GPUs are running on an AWS server (or any other American provider), even if it the server is in the UK the sovereignty claim is null and void.
- StilesCrisis 5mo agoDoesn't "We built it on fully UK sovereign cloud infrastructure, so data never leaves UK jurisdiction" cover that?
- pu_pe 5mo agoIn theory it should, but I've seen that language describing Azure "sovereign cloud" servers before. The data might indeed be stored in the UK, the problem is the CLOUD act which supersedes it.
- greenchair 5mo agoCongrats on the launch. More options for consumers in this space the better!
- timruffles 5mo agoFirstly, congrats! As a Brit this looks cool, and I'm happy to see it. I wish you every success. 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!
- bcjdjsndon 5mo agoIf I could give prizes for comments you'd get one. Too much fart sniffing goes on in these parts, it's always a pleasant change to see dissent
- jonplackett 5mo agoTbf the title only says sovereign _inference_
- quietbritishjim 5mo agoSovereign capability just means that no foreign government can pull the plug. Who cares where it was copied from? 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.
- timruffles 5mo ago
- robertlagrant 5mo agoHi Ben - how are you positioning yourself vs LocAI? I had a few chats with them and they have a fairly similar pitch.
- benjamintnorris 5mo agoWe’re closely partnered with the LocAI model lab, we’re looking forward to running their models on the platform in the next few months!
- robertlagrant 5mo agoAh great! Best of luck. They're a nice bunch.
- ltr_ 5mo agogood prices, but I don't see info on the token cache hits prices (in/out), are they available?.
- lukewarm707 5mo agohttps://relax.ai/privacy-policy https://relax.ai/privacy-policy "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 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
- benjamintnorris 5mo agoHi Luke - both points are fair and worth answering properly. 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!
- lukewarm707 5mo agoall credit to you and best regards.
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- SyneRyder 5mo agoI must be missing something, but is the API post-paid only? I couldn't see where to add pre-paid credit to the account, like OpenAI & Anthropic offer. I'm not really looking to be on another subscription and I would be accessing via third-party harnesses anyway. I'd also want to opt-out of training, which I understandably can't do on the free plan.
- amelius 5mo agoThis looks very interesting. I have no idea why you got downvoted so much.
- iso1631 5mo ago[flagged]
- pjc50 5mo agoCould we have a bit more "who and where" on this please? "Relax.ai by Civo", great, who are Civo? Where's the datacenter? What's the corporate structure? UK resident founders?
- dagi3d 5mo agowhat's preventing you from going to their website? op has linked directly to the documentation, so that info is not necessary expected to be there
- Planktonne 5mo agoOP should have linked to the website rather than the documentation; that would have provided more immediate context for the discussion.
- dagi3d 5mo agoIt depends on who you ask
- pornel 5mo ago> what's preventing you from going to their website? Lack of links. It's a common annoyance when subsections of a site fail to link back to the parent.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- pjc50 5mo agoI did actually try looking for an "about" on the linked page and googling, neither of which was immediately helpful.
- fmajid 5mo agoCivo is a UK cloud provider known mostly for its low-cost Kubernetes hosting service (albeit with fairly expensive storage).
- iLoveOncall 5mo agoWhy would smaller and worse models not be 80% cheaper? 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.
- graemep 5mo agoComment from poster says they are offering Deepseek v4-Pro. Cannot find any details on website.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- ttoinou 5mo agoIts written Input Price: £1.17 Output Price: £2.33 So, slightly cheaper than Fireworks AI
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- anentropic 5mo agoclick "Models and Pricing" in the left menu https://relax.ai/docs/getting-started/pricing https://relax.ai/docs/getting-started/pricing
- benjamintnorris 5mo agoFor the very hardest reasoning tasks GPT-5 and Opus are still ahead, no argument there. But what we see in practice is customers dropping in an open-source model and getting very similar results on 80-90% of real-world use cases — with significant cost savings and end-to-end UK data residency (which matters a lot for our enterprise and institutional customers). And on the consumer-hardware point: these are Blackwell GPUs in a UK datacentre, in a token factory architecture.
- l_c_m 5mo agoThis is very disingenuous, I've been deploying local models to enterprise across a variety of use cases and the optimisation overhead and prompt engineering required to get good performance is huge. Let alone comparative perf to frontier models.
- walthamstow 5mo ago> Civo isn’t just another cloud and AI platform, it’s a whole new way of thinking. come on now
- asddubs 5mo agowell, at least we know they're using their own product
- sph 5mo agoWhen in Rome…
- blitzar 5mo agoClassic LinkedIn copy and paste line you see on someone with "Founder, CEO and Cereal Entrepreneur" in the job description.
- junaru 5mo agoA trailer[1] from a decade comes to mind, even the name almost matches [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBBB-m9peMQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBBB-m9peMQ
- panchtatvam 5mo ago[dead]
- imdsm 5mo agoWhile I'm British, based in the UK, seeing prices in £ really throws me Token prices should be in $ as that's how our brains work
- gregjw 5mo agoLikewise, strange right. I live in Japan now, but even living here, I just expect all online provider pricing to be in USD.
- lxgr 5mo agoWhy'd you want your expenses be billed in a foreign currency if you can help it? Converting once, at the time you pick a provider, is trivial compared to having to continuously think about it as you're paying them.
- imdsm 5mo agoPersonal take: terrible name. RelaxAI feels like you trawled for available .ai domains with dictionary words and landed on this. But it doesn't work, unless it's a relaxed AI. Is it slower, but cheaper, we'll process your requests when we get to them, so relax! You could have bought languagemodels.co.uk off me and used that!
- virtualritz 5mo agoPersonal take: terribly disguised pitch to get someone to buy that way too long domain name from you.
- r_lee 5mo ago> You could have bought languagemodels.co.uk off me and used that! this is a joke, right?
- blitzar 5mo agoRelax, don't do it, when you want to go to it.
- snayan 5mo agoWhat about those in the UK worried about their data when using AI... Perhaps they could, I dunno, relax, knowing they're using a service in their local jurisdiction? 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%.
- Cakez0r 5mo agoUK sovereign data? Land of arrests for posts on social media? Member of five eyes, "you spy on our citizens and we'll spy on yours and call it intelligence sharing"? Land of the infamous Online Safety act? That UK? Why would anyone want their data in the UK?
- pbhjpbhj 5mo agoDid you know people live in the UK? 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?
- Cakez0r 5mo agoWhat I think about the particular case you're talking about is irrelevant. I guess we'll see if allowing the government to police speech is still such a great idea when Reform and all future governments are in power.
- drawfloat 5mo agoBecause they reside in the UK? Why would anyone outside the US want their data in the US, the organiser and leader of the Five Eyes?
- Cakez0r 5mo agoThere is a long list of countries other than the US and the UK. I will go to bat for the US on this one though and say that one might want their data in the US because of the first amendment. Even for people that reside in the UK, what is the selling point of having data with them in the same country?
- yanis_t 5mo agoJust my curiosity. Is (insert country) sovereign X is an efficient marketing strategy these days?
- fmajid 5mo agohttps://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/2026/04/16/how-frances-mistral-built-a-14-billion-ai-empire-by-not-being-american/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/2026/04/16/how-franc...
- stevesimmons 5mo agoIt is if your country isn't in the US and (a) GDPR requires data residency in UK/EU; (b) you're concerned about capricious actions by the US govt cutting off access to US-controlled services (cloud, payments systems, etc).
- dewey 5mo agoI'm not sure if you are asking for hard numbers, but I would say it's definitely "a thing" for people to reduce their reliance on certain countries.
- bcjdjsndon 5mo agoI mean, it's pretty rich for coloniser like the British empire to be talking about soverign anything
- ttoinou 5mo agoHave you heard about companies training LLMs on your data ?
- PaulRobinson 5mo agoYes. 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.
- Havoc 5mo agoNice. All for seeing more geographically diverse options. BTW don’t see opencode in the docs yet much less known tools are?
- benjamintnorris 5mo agoHi! We support OpenCode, as well as any other coding tools accepting OpenAI compatible endpoints. For example, take a look at: https://relax.ai/docs/integrations/developer-productivity-tools/claude-code https://relax.ai/docs/integrations/developer-productivity-to...
- benjamintnorris 5mo agoAlso worth checking out https://github.com/jmesout/relax-claude https://github.com/jmesout/relax-claude
- bflesch 5mo agoAs The Crown is sovereign of the United Kingdom, is this running in Buckingham Palace or in City of London? 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. ;)
- pbhjpbhj 5mo agoParliamentary sovereignty is a cornerstone of the UK constitution, fwiw. Parliament has been de facto sovereign since the late 1600s. The server is under the woolsack!
- 00deadbeef 5mo ago5 minutes to load and it just dumps me to a documentation site with no useful information about that this is, who made it, what it can do, etc.
- benjamintnorris 5mo agoApologies - we had a lot of sudden traffic from Hackernews! We’re looking at it right now. Thanks for flagging.
- tomaytotomato 5mo agoCongrats, its a small step in the right direction. 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!
- benjamintnorris 5mo agoCompletely agree - we’re really eager to work with any UK model lab that wants to make a difference!
- ninjin 5mo agoWell, it surely did not help that the government has been drip-feeding us computational resources. First we had about 16 GPU nodes to share between the whole country for over a decade. Then just before Isambard-AI came online they made one open call for about a week where you could get nearly enough to train a sizeable model, but the call was poorly advertised and in the middle of high vacation season. After this, the only big call explicitly cut out training large language models by its scope and the general calls have been peanuts and less than me and the UK-LLM team had access to during the Isambard-AI beta phase! When I gave a talk at White Hall recently my message was clear: We have the team, the knowledge, the data, etc. We just need an open call for enough compute to train the darn thing! Here is to hoping that they listened.
- mrdw 5mo agobtw, you can claim "relax" name instead of "relaxai" on pypi 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.
- lxgr 5mo agoAnd create yet another completely non-descriptive package name?
- benjamintnorris 5mo agoThank you! We'll check this out.
- ptx 5mo agoIt's probably a better idea to follow the process documented in PEP 541 [1] and contact the PyPI admins to request a transfer of the name. Taking over the domain to impersonate the original owner would look indistinguishable from a supply-chain attack. [1] https://peps.python.org/pep-0541/#how-to-request-a-name-transfer https://peps.python.org/pep-0541/#how-to-request-a-name-tran...
- mrdw 5mo agoYeah, I noticed this library few years ago when checking pypi.org for supply chain attack vulnerability and scanned all libraries. There are a lot of such libraries which you can take over.
- kybernetikos 5mo agoThe obvious approach to me for a country seeking sovereign ai would be to hire as many of the recent qwen core team as possible.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- mezark 5mo agoIf you're talking about UK sovereign LLM inference you need to mention Doubleword... very serious inference optimization lab in london with public endpoints for OS models
- iainmerrick 5mo agoI can't see any information here about prompt caching (AKA prefix caching). That's absolutely required for any serious API usage with pay-per-token pricing. Anyone from Civo or relaxAI here able to clarify that? Thanks!