A British technology company has launched what it describes as an “AI in a box” - a powerful artificial intelligence system designed to sit inside an organisation’s own office rather than relying on huge external cloud data centres.
London-based Locai Labs has unveiled Locai One, a compact AI appliance built using NVIDIA technology that allows businesses and organisations to run advanced AI models on their own premises.
It means sensitive documents, company data and intellectual property can potentially remain within an organisation’s own network rather than being sent to an external AI provider.
And behind the technology is some impressive British AI engineering.
Shrinking powerful AI to fit inside an office
Locai One uses NVIDIA Blackwell GPU technology alongside software and AI models developed by Locai Labs.
At the heart of the launch is the British company's new Juno-N-Coder-25B AI model.
It is based on NVIDIA's recently released Nemotron 3.5 Lightning, an open AI model designed for tasks including reasoning, coding, planning and the increasingly important world of autonomous AI agents. NVIDIA describes Nemotron 3.5 Lightning as a 30-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model designed for fast, specialised AI workloads.
But Locai Labs has managed to make it considerably smaller.
Using its own technology called SPACE - Specialisation Pruning Algorithm for Compression of Experts - the British team reduced the model from 31.56 billion parameters to 25.57 billion, a reduction of around 19 per cent.
According to Locai Labs, testing showed that the resulting specialist model retained the original model's performance on a number of coding benchmarks, although capability was deliberately reduced in areas outside its intended specialism, such as general knowledge and factual recall.
The idea is relatively simple: rather than trying to make an AI model brilliant at absolutely everything, identify the parts needed for a particular job and remove some of what isn't required.
The result requires less memory and can run locally on considerably smaller hardware.
A private AI data centre in the corner of the office
Locai One combines the hardware with the company's Locai OS, Juno AI models, an inference engine and governance tools.
It plugs into an organisation's existing network and is intended to provide local AI processing for tasks such as software development, document analysis and AI agents.
James Drayson, chief executive of Locai Labs, said the aim was to make advanced AI small and efficient enough to operate where an organisation's data is actually held.
His brother and Locai Labs chief AI officer George Drayson summed up the concept neatly:
“Compress the model enough and the data centre becomes the AI box sitting in the corner of your office.”
For businesses dealing with commercially sensitive information, that could be particularly significant.
Instead of continually sending prompts, documents and internal information to an external cloud AI service, an organisation can operate its own models within infrastructure it controls.
It could also change the economics of using AI at scale. Rather than paying an external provider according to the number of tokens or requests processed, Locai says its system offers businesses a more predictable hardware and software cost.
The UK Government is already testing it
The technology isn't just a laboratory demonstration.
Locai One is currently being trialled by the UK Government's Incubator for AI, which is assessing how locally operated AI could be used for secure and data-sensitive government workloads.
Max Hollingdale, Head of Applied AI Engineering at the Incubator for AI, described Locai Labs as an example of Britain's home-grown AI sector at work.
Locai Labs says its own British AI assistant, GB1, is also being hosted locally from a Locai One system at the company's London offices.
More British specialist AI models are coming
Juno-N-Coder-25B is intended specifically for coding and agentic AI, but Locai Labs says this is only the beginning.
The company plans specialist models covering scientific research, finance, law and healthcare, with further versions planned during 2026.
Locai One itself comes in two configurations, using either one or two NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs. Locai Labs says the standard machine starts from £29,950, while Locai One Pro starts from £49,950.
UK deliveries are due to begin in September 2026.
Britain building its own AI capability
Much of the global AI conversation is dominated by enormous American technology companies and billion-pound data centres.
But Locai Labs is pursuing a different approach: make advanced AI smaller, more specialised and capable of running locally.
That could be particularly important for businesses, researchers and government departments that want the benefits of artificial intelligence without handing control of their data, models and computing infrastructure entirely to outside providers.
It's sophisticated technology, built here in Britain - and designed to put powerful AI quite literally inside the workplace.
