The Alan Turing Institute is the United Kingdom’s national institute for data science and artificial intelligence, founded in 2015 and headquartered at the British Library in London. It was established by five founding universities - Cambridge, Edinburgh, Oxford, University College London, and Warwick - together with the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), and is named after the British mathematician and computing pioneer Alan Turing.
The institute expanded its remit to explicitly include artificial intelligence and grew its university network, with eight more universities joining in 2018 and an open network opening to all interested UK universities in 2023. As a charity and national institute it conducts interdisciplinary research, builds skills, and feeds into public policy on data science and AI.
Why a business reader should care: the Turing Institute is the institutional anchor of the UK’s AI ambitions, and it illustrates the European model of pooling university research into a national body rather than relying solely on private labs - the same logic that later underpinned the UK’s national AI strategy.