Britain’s Royal Navy is using Oracle Cloud edge infrastructure to operate AI-driven defenses on the aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales.
The US tech giant says the Royal Navy deployed 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.
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 Reg launched a version of Roving Edge in 2021, saying it allows customers to run workloads, including machine learning and analytics, in the field.
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.”
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.”
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.
Let’s hope the Royal Navy doesn’t find, as many businesses have, that AI doesn’t actually improve productivity, because humans have to spend at least as much time checking its output for errors as they saved by using it.
Or even worse, that the system hallucinates false information, as many AI models are prone to doing.
Oracle’s own AI-enhanced support portal, for example, was recently found to have made the service worse than the system it replaced.
Saga provides an app-like interface that allows Royal Navy personnel to capture lessons, review mission data, and access AI support, Whitespace says.
Oracle has bet big on AI, spending billions on datacenter investments to tap up developers and enterprise customers, and saddling itself with huge debt at the same time. ®