Welsh Cabinet Minister Adam Price says Wales should focus less on building frontier AI models and more on putting the technology to work. His argument is that smaller countries can compete by joining up power, data, skills, public consent and organisations ready to change how they operate.
Watch Desk analysis
What happened
At a talk hosted by Harvard Kennedy School’s Growth Lab, Price argued that small nations can adapt AI by coordinating its adoption across businesses and public services. He pointed to Wales’s size as a potential advantage: decision-makers can be closer to the people and organisations expected to use the technology.
Price said major US companies are expected to spend about $800 billion this year, mostly on data centres and chips, and argued Wales cannot win a race to build frontier models. Instead, he said, access to AI will matter less than the ability to apply it well. The Crimson reports that he highlighted Wales’s digitised health records as one example of data infrastructure that could support that effort.
Why it matters
This is a different measure of AI ambition from the familiar contest over model size and computing spend. For a smaller country, the question becomes whether organisations can access useful tools, develop skilled people and redesign services around them, rather than whether they can fund a frontier lab of their own.
Price’s five-part formulation also makes clear that buying technology is only one link in the chain. Power and data matter, but so do public acceptance and the willingness of firms and public services to change their processes. A weak link can limit the value of the rest.
Our read
The argument is more useful than a tidy “small is beautiful” slogan because it names the work required: infrastructure, skills, trust and organisational change. But coordination is not a magic advantage by itself. Wales still has to show that its connected institutions can turn those ingredients into useful, trusted services, and that its approach can travel beyond a speech.
What to watch
- Whether Wales turns its health-data infrastructure into specific, useful AI applications.
- How government and businesses build the skills and power capacity Price says adoption requires.
- Whether public consent and service redesign become part of AI plans in practice, not just in the pitch.
Discussion spark: Should smaller countries invest in building their own frontier AI models, or concentrate on adopting existing systems well and building local expertise?
Sources and evidence
- Source update (16 October 2026, 12:00 UTC)
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