Chips and drones to be at heart of Andy Burnham’s push to ‘reindustrialise’, AI minister says

Chip building and drones will be at the heart of Andy Burnham’s drive to “reindustrialise” Britain, the minister for AI has said, insisting that the technology would be “front and centre” in the new prime minister’s plan.

But Kanishka Narayan told the FT that the government rejected “tech boosterism” and would act through regulation and other measures to deal with AI’s “material risks” to jobs and national security.

Narayan, in his first interview since Burnham promoted him to the cabinet, said he wanted crucial emerging technologies to remain under British control and was “learning the lessons of the past” when nascent companies had been sold off.

On replacing Sir Keir Starmer as Labour leader, Burnham said he wanted to “reindustrialise” Britain and rejected “wrong turns in the 1980s”.

Narayan, whose role as AI minister under Starmer was more junior, said Burnham’s was not a “backward-looking vision” and that AI was “the way to reindustrialise this country”.

He said he was “focused on AI chips being built here” because hardware was “where most of the economic value, most of the leverage and most of the supply chain constraint is. It’s also what the British public wants to reindustrialise”. AI-powered drones would be a crucial part of “modern re-industrialisation in the defence context”, he added.

To understand Burnham’s vision, “we should think about chip factories. We should think about drones and defence and we should think about AI being applied to run manufacturing processes better,” he said. “AI is going to be pretty front and centre.”

Narayan, 36, also said he would use his seat at the top table to fight for state investment in AI, visas for top engineers and planning reform to speed up the building of technology infrastructure.

Tech companies have reacted with dismay to Burnham’s decision to abolish the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, which was set up in 2023 by then Conservative prime minister Rishi Sunak as part of the “science…