Advania is an “AI firm”, its UK leader has asserted as he vowed to roll the capability of recent acquisition Gompute to UK shores by early 2026.
The Sweden-headquartered IT solutions provider last month grabbed HPC and AI infrastructure platform Gompute from Nordic datacentre services firm atNorth.
It was Advania’s second AI-infused acquisition inside two months following its purchase of AI consultancy The AI Framework in June.
The Goldman Sachs-backed outfit, which has amassed a £452m-revenue UK business via three quickfire acquisitions – recently begun branding itself as an “AI services company”.
Talking to IT Channel Oxygen, Advania UK CEO Geoff Kneen claimed AI now runs through “everything we do”, from how Advania develops, checks and tests code to how it produces documents for solutions architecture.
“We are an AI firm,” he said.
“That’s the way we look at our own business, it’s the way we look at helping our clients, and more and more it’s the way that we’re delivering our services – they’re all powered by AI.”
AI “conundrum”
Advania’s strategy reflects the fact that the “AI conundrum has got a number of facets to it”, Kneen said.
“That’s what the two recent acquisitions have been about,” he explained.
“The AI Framework is almost along the lines of a management consultancy capability to help clients really understand the art of the possible with AI – and that really complements everything we’ve already got through the relationship with Microsoft.
“There’s actually also an infrastructure piece to it as well, particularly around the midmarket. Not everybody’s going to be able to afford to acquire NVDIA GPUs. Can you build an infrastructure that allows people to access it on a more federated model? That’s our approach.
“Some of the elements that are really special about the atNorth Gompute capability is that it’s not just the straightforward office-related computing type of workloads. We can actually host or provide capabilities for production facilities, research and development facilities and different types of workloads that may come on platforms like Linux.”
Using AI to “help us grow faster”
As covered last week by IT Channel Oxygen, vendor giants such as Microsoft, Salesforce and IBM have replaced some human roles with AI in 2025.
Echoing recent comments made by peers during an Oxygen 250 podcast discussion, Kneen said Advania’s strategy is to use AI to “help us grow faster”, however.
“There might be aspects of roles that a human isn’t needed to do, but we’d then be looking at how you enhance that role,” he said.
“To use an example in HR, comparing CVs across numerous roles that we might have open can be done by AI.
“[It’s about] how we get people in to more effective, more value-add parts of the role they’re doing and spending more time on that, because that helps us grow faster.”
Doug Woodburn is editor of IT Channel Oxygen
