AI TRENDS | UK Envoy Naz Shah Visits Sarawak to Discuss AI, Energy, and Sustainable Development

A UK delegation led by British lawmaker and UK Trade Envoy to ASEAN Naz Shah visited Kuching, Sarawak, and met Sarawak Premier Abang Johari to discuss Sarawak’s progress in AI, energy, and sustainable economic development. According to Foresight News, the visit was reported by the Sarawak government’s official news outlet. FLock.io’s head of institutional development Mohammed (Mo) Marikar and Sarawak Artificial Intelligence Centre (SAIC) CEO Prof. Patrick Then also attended the discussions. The trip followed a memorandum of understanding signed between the UK and Sarawak in Manchester, with talks covering sovereign AI, the energy transition, and sustainable development. FLock.io and SAIC said they completed a federated-learning-based fine-tuning practice for an indigenous language large language model in February. FLock.io said decentralized AI and federated learning could be used to locally train, deploy, and govern domain-specific AI systems for Sarawak in areas including public services, energy, healthcare, and agriculture. FLock.io also cited its prior involvement in a Manchester green sovereign AI infrastructure collaboration, a University of Cambridge partnership on AI economics and policy research, and a University of Oxford roundtable on sovereign AI governance, safety, verification, and trusted deployment.