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Two or three clusters, read side by side across sectors, research, companies, capital, infrastructure, government designations and UKIZ relevance. There is no score and no ranking: British clusters are different from one another, not better or worse than one another.

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Side by side

Dimension	Cardiff & South WalesWales	Teesside & the HumberNorth East / Yorkshire and the Humber	Birmingham & the West MidlandsWest Midlands
Sectors	Semiconductors, Advanced Materials, Creative Industries Supporting: Clean Energy, Advanced Manufacturing, Digital Technologies	Clean Energy, Advanced Manufacturing, Advanced Materials Supporting: Digital Technologies, AgriTech & FoodTech	Mobility & Transport Technology, Advanced Manufacturing, Quantum Technologies, Advanced Materials Supporting: Clean Energy, Digital Technologies, Defence & Security
Research	Cardiff University Swansea University	Not recorded on the map.	University of Birmingham University of Warwick WMG
Companies	South Wales compound semiconductor cluster	Not recorded on the map.	Not recorded on the map.
Infrastructure	Not recorded on the map. Compound semiconductor fabrication and research facilities, materials and coatings research, production studios.	Centre for Process Innovation Process innovation and biologics scale-up facilities, port capacity and grid-connected industrial land.	Energy Systems Catapult UK Battery Industrialisation Centre Automotive research centres, battery and vehicle test facilities and major logistics assets.
Capital	Public and corporate capital dominate; venture funding is limited by capital intensity.	Infrastructure capital, corporate investment and public programmes; almost no local venture base.	Corporate and supply chain finance dominate; venture capital is thin relative to industrial output.
Government programmes	Wales Investment Zone designations — Investment Zones	Teesside Freeport — Freeports Humber Freeport — Freeports	West Midlands Investment Zone — Investment Zones
What exists	The UK's compound semiconductor cluster, combining research, fabrication and supply chain, alongside steel and coatings materials research, and a significant screen production economy.	The largest concentration of industrial decarbonisation activity in the UK: hydrogen, carbon capture, process manufacturing, biologics scale-up capability and two Freeports with substantial serviced industrial land.	The largest manufacturing base in the UK by employment, automotive and electrification engineering, rail and mobility research, and a young, large working-age population.
What's missing · UKIZ interpretation	Design demand. Fabrication capability needs a pipeline of UK customers designing products that use it, and capital patient enough for semiconductor timelines.	Skills pipelines and company formation. The land, power and permits exist; the innovation companies and the technical workforce to fill them do not yet exist at the same scale.	Ownership of the value in electrified vehicles: battery, power electronics and software increasingly sit outside the region and outside the UK. Innovation-active SME supply chains are under-capitalised.
What could connect · UKIZ interpretation	South Wales fabrication connected to Bristol and Cambridge chip design and to defence, automotive and energy customers who currently source overseas.	Industrial land and process scale-up capability connected to research clusters elsewhere that have technologies without a place to build them — a national scale-up site rather than a regional one.	Midlands manufacturing paired with battery and power electronics research, North East battery production and Coventry testing capability as a single electrification value chain.
UKIZ relevance	Compound semiconductors are a genuine national specialism with a fragile ownership base. The proposed Wales mission focuses on keeping the value chain here.	This is where Britain either builds an energy supply chain or imports one. The proposed Teesside & Humber mission is explicitly about retained industrial capability.	The region's transition depends on owning the new value in a vehicle rather than assembling someone else's. The proposed Midlands zone focuses on batteries, power electronics and software.
Last verified	15 August 2026	15 August 2026	15 August 2026

Proposed by UKIZ · independent · not a government designation

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