Britain’s Royal Navy is using Oracle Cloud edge infrastructure to operate AI-driven defenses on the aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales.<\/p>\n
The US tech giant says the Royal Navy deployed<\/a> a so-called “sovereign AI capability” aboard the vessel during Operation Highmast, an eight-month mission in 2025 that saw it traverse the Mediterranean, Middle East, and Indo-Pacific.<\/p>\n This was operated using Oracle’s Roving Edge Infrastructure – a locally hosted version of its cloud platform, running on hardware inside a military-grade, ruggedized enclosure. Big Red launched a version of Roving Edge<\/a> in 2021, saying it allows customers to run workloads, including machine learning and analytics, in the field.<\/p>\n The AI was developed by Belfast-based Whitespace, which describes the Saga platform as “an AI tool designed to accelerate how defense organizations capture, manage, and exploit institutional knowledge.”<\/p>\n According to Oracle, the platform let the Prince of Wales crew run AI to support decision-making and operational learning, turning mission data into “actionable understanding.”<\/p>\n Using “AI solutions across the entire operations of the Royal Navy is critical to the UK’s defensive capabilities,” claimed First Sea Lord Sir Gwyn Jenkins.<\/p>\n Let’s hope the Royal Navy doesn’t find, as many businesses have, that AI doesn’t actually improve productivity<\/a>, because humans have to spend at least as much time checking its output for errors<\/a> as they saved by using it.<\/p>\n Or even worse, that the system hallucinates false information, as many AI models are prone to doing<\/a>.<\/p>\n Oracle’s own AI-enhanced support portal, for example, was recently found to have made the service worse<\/a> than the system it replaced.<\/p>\n Saga provides an app-like interface that allows Royal Navy personnel to capture lessons, review mission data, and access AI support, Whitespace says.<\/p>\n