The U.K. government under Labor Prime Minister Keir Starmer is set to announce a plan Monday to implement a massive increase in the country’s computing infrastructure in order to foster the growth of homegrown artificial intelligence startups that can rival the likes of OpenAI.

Under the U.K.’s “AI Opportunities Action Plan,” the government has set itself an ambitious goal of increasing the country’s data center capacity by as much as 20-fold by the end of the decade, CNBC reported today. It’s doing this in order to encourage the development of more advanced AI models, which are reliant on high-performance computing resources.

Starmer (pictured) will visit Bristol, England, on Monday in order to announce the new initiative, which comes after he canceled £1.3 billion of taxpayer-funding that was set to be spent on alternative AI projects. Those projects, an AI Research Resource and an “exascale” supercomputer system, were previously unveiled by Starmer’s predecessor, the Conservative PM Rishi Sunak.

The plan comes at a time when European governments are showing increased interest in the idea of “sovereign AI,” which refers to the belief that countries should ensure that new technologies critical to economic growth and national security are built and developed domestically.

As part of the U.K.’s plan, Starmer’s government wants to set up a number of “AI growth zones” across the country. Within these zones, rules on planning permission will be relaxed in order to remove obstacles to the construction of new data centers.

At the same time, there are plans to create a new “AI Energy Council” that includes AI and energy industry leaders. They will be tasked with exploring how these new data centers can be powered with renewable and low-carbon energy sources, such as nuclear power.

That last initiative seems to be inspired by recent moves from U.S. tech giants such as Amazon.com Inc., Google LLC and Microsoft Corp. to invest in “small modular reactors” that will provide an alternative source of low-carbon energy for their private data centers.

Once the infrastructure is in place, the U.K. hopes to create a new “National Data Library” that will help to boost cooperation between public institutions such as universities and the private sector. Ultimately, it wants to pave the way for the rise of AI startups that can create “sovereign AI models” and reduce its reliance on Silicon Valley-based firms.

However, it remains to be seen if the initiative will help to overcome the funding challenges experienced by U.K.-based entrepreneurs, who have struggled to raise the kind of cash that’s available to AI leaders such as OpenAI.

Some U.K. founders and venture capitalists have called for the country’s pension funds to allocate more of their resources to riskier, high-growth startups. Magnus Grimeland, the founder and Chief Executive of U.K.-based VC Antler Ltd., told CNBC in an interview last year that the country’s pension funds have more than $7 trillion that they’re looking to invest.

“Imagine if you take just 5% of that and allocate it to innovation — you solve the problem,” he said.

Although funding remains a challenge, tech leaders have expressed optimism about the country’s plans. Chintan Patel, chief technology officer of Cisco Systems Inc. in the U.K., said that having a clearly-defined roadmap is “critical for the country to achieve its ambition to become an AI superpower.”

In addition, the U.K. is aiming to introduce a more lenient regulatory framework for AI that will give AI developers more leeway than the European Union’s AI Act, which puts a lot of restrictions on the use of copyrighted data.

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