UK sovereign LLM inference

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.

amelius

This looks very interesting. I have no idea why you got downvoted so much.

pjc50

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?

iLoveOncall

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.

walthamstow

> Civo isn’t just another cloud and AI platform, it’s a whole new way of thinking. come on now

imdsm

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

imdsm

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!

Cakez0r

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

Just my curiosity. Is (insert country) sovereign X is an efficient marketing strategy these days?

Havoc

Nice. All for seeing more geographically diverse options. BTW don’t see opencode in the docs yet much less known tools are?

bflesch

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

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.

tomaytotomato

Congrats, its a small step in the right direction. 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. We really need to get our own equivalent to Mistral, and fast!

mrdw

btw, you can claim "relax" name instead of "relaxai" on pypi 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.

kybernetikos

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.

mezark

If you're talking about UK sovereign LLM inference you need to mention Doubleword... very serious inference optimization lab in london with public endpoints for OS models

iainmerrick

I can't see any information here about prompt caching (AKA prefix caching). That's absolutely required for any serious API usage with pay-per-token pricing. Anyone from Civo or relaxAI here able to clarify that? Thanks!