[benjamintnorris]

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.

[timruffles]

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!

[quietbritishjim]

Sovereign 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]

> Sovereign capability just means that no foreign government can pull the plug

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.

[quietbritishjim]

> 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

OK, that's a fair point.

[carderne]

The UK grid does not import 44% of its energy.

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?

[timruffles]

Import dependency. The UK government put it at 43.5% in 2025 and 43.8% in 2024: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/69cd1451b5210...

> 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.

[bcjdjsndon]

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

[jonplackett]

Tbf the title only says sovereign _inference_

[jstummbillig]

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.

[benjamintnorris]

Hi 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.

[lukewarm707]

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

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]

Hi 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]

all credit to you and best regards.

[imdsm]

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.

[drawfloat]

Much the same way the word "patriotism" is more common in US national discourse, "sovereignty" is very common in UK national discourse.

[bcjdjsndon]

You're thinking of when chavs used to wear sovereign rings... it's fell out of fashion now tbh

[raesene9]

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...

[StilesCrisis]

He does say that? "running on NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs in the UK" is in there and that's pretty unambiguous.

[pu_pe]

The 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.

[benjamintnorris]

Civo isn’t a US company and isn’t a subsidiary of one. UK-incorporated since 2018, UK-resident leadership, no US parent, entirely UK founder owned. We also share the concern on the Azure/AWS “sovereign cloud”, but this doesn't apply here. The CLOUD Act reaches data held by US entities regardless of where the servers sit, which is exactly why those offerings are problematic. We’re outside that jurisdiction by corporate structure, not just geography.

[StilesCrisis]

Doesn't "We built it on fully UK sovereign cloud infrastructure, so data never leaves UK jurisdiction" cover that?

[pu_pe]

In 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.

[SyneRyder]

I 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.

[spacebanana7]

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).

[greenchair]

Congrats on the launch. More options for consumers in this space the better!

[graemep]

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?

[robertlagrant]

Hi Ben - how are you positioning yourself vs LocAI? I had a few chats with them and they have a fairly similar pitch.

[benjamintnorris]

We’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]

Ah great! Best of luck. They're a nice bunch.

[ltr_]

good prices, but I don't see info on the token cache hits prices (in/out), are they available?.

[hathym]

why use this over openrouter?

[raesene9]

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]

Avoiding routing through US or US-based companies.

[imdsm]

good question, it's going to take a lot to dislodge openrouter from my workflows

[bocytron]

openrouter is an US based company, so falls under CLOUD Act