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UK sovereign LLM inference

https://relax.ai/docs
58•benjamintnorris•1h ago

Comments

benjamintnorris•1h ago
Hi 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•35m ago
Hey 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.
graemep•33m ago
So 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•32m ago
Is 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•30m ago
why use this over openrouter?
imdsm•22m ago
good question, it's going to take a lot to dislodge openrouter from my workflows
raesene9•15m ago
I'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.
nicce•15m ago
Avoiding routing through US or US-based companies.
imdsm•23m ago
Marketing 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.

StilesCrisis•19m ago
He does say that? "running on NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs in the UK" is in there and that's pretty unambiguous.
drawfloat•19m ago
Much the same way the word "patriotism" is more common in US national discourse, "sovereignty" is very common in UK national discourse.
bcjdjsndon•10m ago
You're thinking of when chavs used to wear sovereign rings... it's fell out of fashion now tbh
raesene9•16m ago
Data Sovereignty as a term is now fairly well established term that doesn't have specific government connotations e.g. https://events.linuxfoundation.org/kubecon-cloudnativecon-eu...
greenchair•20m ago
Congrats on the launch. More options for consumers in this space the better!
timruffles•10m ago
Firstly, 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•6m ago
If 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
amelius•44m ago
This looks very interesting.

I have no idea why you got downvoted so much.

iso1631•27m ago
HN doesn't like data sovereignty. AMERICA NUMBER ONE and all that.
pjc50•41m ago
Could 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•27m ago
what'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•19m ago
OP should have linked to the website rather than the documentation; that would have provided more immediate context for the discussion.
dagi3d•4m ago
depends who you ask to.
pornel•14m 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.

fmajid•15m ago
Civo is a UK cloud provider known mostly for its low-cost Kubernetes hosting service (albeit with fairly expensive storage).
iLoveOncall•39m ago
Why 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•22m ago
Comment from poster says they are offering Deepseek v4-Pro. Cannot find any details on website.
ttoinou•9m ago
Its written

Input Price: £1.17 Output Price: £2.33

So, slightly cheaper than Fireworks AI

walthamstow•37m ago
> Civo isn’t just another cloud and AI platform, it’s a whole new way of thinking.

come on now

asddubs•32m ago
well, at least we know they're using their own product
sph•23m ago
When in Rome…
blitzar•13m ago
Classic LinkedIn copy and paste line you see on someone with "Founder, CEO and Cereal Entrepreneur" in the job description.
junaru•6m ago
A trailer[1] from a decade comes to mind, even the name almost matches

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBBB-m9peMQ

imdsm•24m ago
While 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•14m ago
Likewise, strange right. I live in Japan now, but even living here, I just expect all online provider pricing to be in USD.
imdsm•21m ago
Personal 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•16m ago
Personal take: terribly disguised pitch to get someone to buy that way too long domain name from you.
r_lee•15m ago
> You could have bought languagemodels.co.uk off me and used that!

this is a joke, right?

blitzar•10m ago
Relax, don't do it, when you want to go to it.
Cakez0r•20m ago
UK 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?
yanis_t•16m ago
Just my curiosity. Is (insert country) sovereign X is an efficient marketing strategy these days?
fmajid•14m ago
https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/2026/04/16/how-franc...
stevesimmons•10m ago
It 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•10m ago
I'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•5m ago
I mean, it's pretty rich for coloniser like the British empire to be talking about soverign anything
ttoinou•9m ago
Have you heard about companies training LLMs on your data ?
Havoc•14m ago
Nice. All for seeing more geographically diverse options.

BTW don’t see opencode in the docs yet much less known tools are?

bflesch•11m ago
As 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.

;)

00deadbeef•11m ago
5 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.

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