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?
relaxAI is a spin-out from Civo — UK-incorporated cloud provider, been around since 2018, founded by Mark Boost. Probably best known for managed Kubernetes (fmajid’s got it right downthread).<p>We spun out in 2026 to focus on sovereign inference and UK workloads that need in-country processing. UK-resident founders. Not a UK subsidiary of a foreign hyperscaler or model provider — wholly UK-owned and operated, running in Civo’s LON1 datacentre.<p>ICO-registered, NCSC-aligned, on G-Cloud via CCS. UK law and UK courts only, no cross-border data flow at any layer. The majority of our customers are UK orgs where in-country processing is a hard requirement such as UK healthcare, legal and education companies.
Civo is a UK cloud provider known mostly for its low-cost Kubernetes hosting service (albeit with fairly expensive storage).
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
OP should have linked to the website rather than the documentation; that would have provided more immediate context for the discussion.
> what's preventing you from going to their website?<p>Lack of links.<p>It's a common annoyance when subsections of a site fail to link back to the parent.
I did actually try looking for an "about" on the linked page and googling, neither of which was immediately helpful.
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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.
Just my curiosity. Is (insert country) sovereign X is an efficient marketing strategy these days?
Yes.<p>Some people might interpret this comment as political commentary, but it’s actually just the reality of what people are saying and doing.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
>This was a campaign strategy/promise for the US President.<p>I don't remember seeing "if you elect me I'll destroy NATO, threaten allies, and make sure even USA's oldest allies hate us" as part of the campaign.<p>Perhaps you could link that promise from the time before the election?<p>As to your questions, I think people are hoping that rule of law returns and there is an outbreak of common sense. No-one really expected US president will align with Russia and a cult of pseudo-Christian white-supremacist nationalists will worship him as the second coming as an expectation. That the Senate, SC, and tech leaders have fallen in place behind that (the latter literally paying fealty to their god-king) is complete insanity.
> No-one really expected US president will align with Russia and a cult of pseudo-Christian white-supremacist nationalists will worship him as the second coming as an expectation. That the Senate, SC, and tech leaders have fallen in place behind that (the latter literally paying fealty to their god-king) is complete insanity.<p>I think it's completely expected that the Senate Republicans would do what they were told, and the multi-decade project to stack the Supreme Court with extremists to overthrow <i>Roe v. Wade</i> was something that was very obvious while it was happening.
> <i>No-one really expected US president will align with Russia and a cult of pseudo-Christian white-supremacist nationalists will worship him as the second coming as an expectation. That the Senate, SC, and tech leaders have fallen in place behind that (the latter literally paying fealty to their god-king) is complete insanity.</i><p>I would like to remind you of Project 2025. While Trump claimed to know nothing about it prior to being elected, so far he's appointed every editor/contributor to the document/project to his administration and achieved more than half of the stated goals of the document.
> No-one really expected US president will align with Russia and a cult of pseudo-Christian white-supremacist nationalists will worship him as the second coming as an expectation.<p>I'm sorry but <i>everyone</i> who was paying attention expected exactly that.
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Suspect it depends on the sentiment.<p>Don't think you'd have much luck convincing say a German that they shouldn't use Mistral because it isn't German sovereign. But you might have luck with that line against china or america.<p>Or put differently depends more on the fault lines in public perception than strict borders
<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/2026/04/16/how-frances-mistral-built-a-14-billion-ai-empire-by-not-being-american/" rel="nofollow">https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/2026/04/16/how-franc...</a>
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.
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).
Have you heard about companies training LLMs on your data ?
Yes, at least in certain sectors.
US tech is currently being weaponized against the ICC and its member judges in Europe[1], and the US is threatening to annex Greenland, as a result all (former) US allies are scrambling to get rid of their strategic dependency.<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/11/19/nicolas-guillou-french-icc-judge-sanctioned-by-the-us-you-are-effectively-blacklisted-by-much-of-the-world-s-banking-system_6747628_4.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/11/19/n...</a>
btw, you can claim "relax" name instead of "relaxai" on pypi<p>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.
The obvious approach to me for a country seeking sovereign ai would be to hire as many of the recent qwen core team as possible.
Congrats, its a small step in the right direction.<p>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.<p>We really need to get our own equivalent to Mistral, and fast!
Well, 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 <i>one</i> open call for about a week where you could get <i>nearly</i> 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 <i>just</i> need an open call for enough compute to train the darn thing! Here is to hoping that they listened.
Completely agree - we’re really eager to work with any UK model lab that wants to make a difference!
> Civo isn’t just another cloud and AI platform, it’s a whole new way of thinking.<p>come on now
well, at least we know they're using their own product
Classic LinkedIn copy and paste line you see on someone with "Founder, CEO and Cereal Entrepreneur" in the job description.
When in Rome…
A trailer[1] from a decade comes to mind, even the name almost matches<p>[1] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBBB-m9peMQ" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBBB-m9peMQ</a>
Nice. All for seeing more geographically diverse options.<p>BTW don’t see opencode in the docs yet much less known tools are?
Hi! We support OpenCode, as well as any other coding tools accepting OpenAI compatible endpoints. For example, take a look at: <a href="https://relax.ai/docs/integrations/developer-productivity-tools/claude-code" rel="nofollow">https://relax.ai/docs/integrations/developer-productivity-to...</a>
Also worth checking out <a href="https://github.com/jmesout/relax-claude" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/jmesout/relax-claude</a>
Why would smaller and worse models not be 80% cheaper?<p>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.
For 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.
Comment from poster says they are offering Deepseek v4-Pro. Cannot find any details on website.
click "Models and Pricing" in the left menu <a href="https://relax.ai/docs/getting-started/pricing" rel="nofollow">https://relax.ai/docs/getting-started/pricing</a>
Its written<p>Input Price:
£1.17
Output Price:
£2.33<p>So, slightly cheaper than Fireworks AI
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!<p>You could have bought languagemodels.co.uk off me and used that!
What 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?<p>And more generally, let the AI do the thinking/coding/whatever... Just relax until it's ready.<p>I will say, I find it interesting that the world relax has such a negative connotation in your mind.<p>Anyhow, Is it the best name ever? No.<p>Is it a hell of a lot better than languagemodels.co.uk? 1000%.
Personal take: terribly disguised pitch to get someone to buy that way too long domain name from you.
> You could have bought languagemodels.co.uk off me and used that!<p>this is a joke, right?
Relax, don't do it, when you want to go to it.
As The Crown is sovereign of the United Kingdom, is this running in Buckingham Palace or in City of London?<p>Can the user choose which sovereign is doing the computation?<p>I'd personally prefer not to have the weird uncle do the computation, maybe the younger ones living abroad can do it.<p>;)
This looks very interesting.<p>I have no idea why you got downvoted so much.
Hi HN, I'm Ben, founding engineer at relaxAI.<p>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.<p>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!<p>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.<p>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.
Firstly, congrats! As a Brit this looks cool, and I'm happy to see it. I wish you every success.<p>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.<p>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'.<p>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.<p>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!
Sovereign capability just means that no foreign government can pull the plug. Who cares where it was copied from?<p>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.<p>Maybe that's not how you like the term to be used but it's widely used that way and widely understood.
> Sovereign capability just means that no foreign government can pull the plug<p>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).<p>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<p>> Maybe that's not how you like the term to be used but it's widely used that way and widely understood.<p>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.
> 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<p>OK, that's a fair point.
The UK grid does not import 44% of its energy.<p>Gell-Mann suggests I should treat the rest of your post with skepticism.<p>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?
Import dependency. The UK government put it at 43.5% in 2025 and 43.8% in 2024: <a href="https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/69cd1451b5210036050bc625/Energy_Trends_March_2026.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/69cd1451b5210...</a><p>> EDIT: maybe you meant the UK total primary energy? I feel like that's extending the boundary a bit far.<p>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.
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
Tbf the title only says sovereign _inference_
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.
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.
<a href="https://relax.ai/privacy-policy" rel="nofollow">https://relax.ai/privacy-policy</a><p>"We may share personal information to third parties outside of the UK"<p>"to find out how long your information is being retained, please see 'additional information'". Additional information is an email address.<p><a href="https://relax.ai/terms-of-service" rel="nofollow">https://relax.ai/terms-of-service</a><p>non-committal will not share customer data "except[...]with the consent of the Customer". 'see DPA'. there is no DPA on this page.<p>otherwise,<p>my use on novita with zero data retention [in, out, cache]: [65.9, 2.4, 424.6]<i>[1.74, 3.48, 0.13] = $178.22<p>i couldn't see cache price on relax, so [65.9, 2.4, 424.6]</i>[1.17, 2.33, 1.17] = 579.48gbp = $774.45
Marketing aside, why are you using the term "UK sovereign"?<p>I assume UK based DCs, so why not just say that, UK based LLM inference.<p>Is it a DC owned/ran by HM Gov? Is that why it's sovereign?<p>Not a criticism, more of a critique.
Much the same way the word "patriotism" is more common in US national discourse, "sovereignty" is very common in UK national discourse.
Data Sovereignty as a term is now fairly well established term that doesn't have specific government connotations e.g. <a href="https://events.linuxfoundation.org/kubecon-cloudnativecon-europe/co-located-events/open-sovereign-cloud-day/" rel="nofollow">https://events.linuxfoundation.org/kubecon-cloudnativecon-eu...</a>
He does say that? "running on NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs in the UK" is in there and that's pretty unambiguous.
Is your business plan essentially to run mid tier models on hardware in the UK?<p>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).
Hi Ben - how are you positioning yourself vs LocAI? I had a few chats with them and they have a fairly similar pitch.
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?
good prices, but I don't see info on the token cache hits prices (in/out), are they available?.
Congrats on the launch. More options for consumers in this space the better!
why use this over openrouter?
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.
Avoiding routing through US or US-based companies.
openrouter is an US based company, so falls under CLOUD Act
good question, it's going to take a lot to dislodge openrouter from my workflows
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While I'm British, based in the UK, seeing prices in £ really throws me<p>Token prices should be in $ as that's how our brains work
Why'd you want your expenses be billed in a foreign currency if you can help it?<p>Converting once, at the time you pick a provider, is trivial compared to having to continuously think about it as you're paying them.
Likewise, strange right. I live in Japan now, but even living here, I just expect all online provider pricing to be in USD.
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?
Having data processed in the UK is not for privacy reasons, but legal reasons when working in Govt. fields such as legal/healthcare/security. For privacy most companies choose juristications with better privacy laws such as switzerland.
Did you know people live in the UK?<p>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?
Because 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?
There 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?