LONDON: Microsoft UK hosted an online event to discuss the impact of the UK’s likely departure from the European Union on the tech industry.
According to details, the company currently has two large data centers in the UK, and it is expanding these in response to vigorous demand for cloud services. But Brexit could throw a spanner in the works. Owen Larter, Microsoft’s UK Government Affairs Manager, said that if import tariffs were imposed on the UK then the company would have to reconsider.
Larter said that the company’s servers are built both in China and Eastern Europe. Presently, the devices assembled within the EU incur no tariffs on being brought into the UK. But, if that changes and significant import tariffs are imposed on those machines, Larter said the firm might instead build out its European datacentres to avoid those extra costs.
Larter did express some faint optimism about immigration, however. The UK currently imposes strict rules on migration from outside the EU, with both caps on the number of visas and a points system to qualify for entry into the UK. Larter said that the firm has “struggled internally” to bring people to the UK from the US, China, and India as a result of these policies. With the UK leaving the EU and, presumably, seeing reduced migration from EU countries, immigration caps may be raised to allow a greater number of non-EU workers.
This remains far from certain, however. With strict migration controls being a big reason that people voted to leave the EU in the first place, it’s not clear that the UK government is going to be in any great hurry to expand non-EU migration.
