The $5.5tn (£4.1tn) US chipmaker Nvidia is donating $250m worth of computing power to the UK to support AI safety research.

The donation from the world’s most valuable company comes as the UK government confirmed its AI Security Institute, which tests advance AI models, will be able to examine cutting-edge technology developed by companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Google before they are released.

Nvidia said the donation, which spans five years, would “support agentic safety and security research across the UK”.

Safety concerns about AI agents – highly capable computer programs that are able to design and perform sequences of tasks autonomously – have risen since the summer, when OpenAI confirmed that a “swarm” of agents had attacked Hugging Face, a tech startup.

Nvidia did not reference AISI in its statement but said most of the money would “support the wider UK AI safety and security research community”, with a proportion of the cash going to the -led British Open-Ended Learning and Discovery Lab, the Science of Fundamental AI Research Lab – run by the Edinburgh, Cambridge, Oxford and University College London universities – and Imperial College London.

“The UK brings world-class scientific rigour to this essential engineering challenge,” said Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive. “With this $250m commitment, Nvidia will put accelerated computing in the hands of UK researchers to develop, test and strengthen safeguards for increasingly powerful AI.”

Kanishka Narayan, the UK’s AI minister, said the announcement was a “vote of confidence in our world-leading strength and expertise in AI research”.