New UK AI investment comes with a cost - your bills and our climate

Donald Campbell is the Director of Advocacy for Foxglove, a tech justice non-profit that works to make tech fair for everyone.

The British government's recent claim that Big Tech’s roll-out of vast, new data centres will happen “sustainably” has suffered a fatal blow.

These enormous facilities are being built at breakneck speed by tech giants engaged in the AI gold rush, demanding astonishingly large quantities of electricity that result in massive climate emissions.

Just one data centre being built in the U.S. by Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg is expected to use twice as much electricity as the entire city of New Orleans.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer's government is desperate to replicate this construction frenzy in the UK, as has been painfully clear this week with US tech CEOs invited to royal banquets.

Yet for a long time, the government has claimed that things will be different here, saying its plans to allow Big Tech to roll out data centres across the country would be carried out “sustainably”.

Sustainable?

In April, ministers established an ‘AI Energy Council’ which they said would work on “improving energy efficiency and sustainability in AI.”

This had always seemed a dubious claim.

But this week, with President Trump and his Big Tech entourage coming to the UK, the mask finally slipped.

The CEO of Nvidia, a firm valued in the trillions because it makes chips that are in high demand in the AI race, told reporters he is “hoping gas turbines are going to…contribute” to powering Big Tech’s UK data centres.

Impatient about having to wait their turn to connect to the UK’s energy grid, and unwilling to build new, clean renewable resources to power their data centres, tech giants now want new, fossil gas capacity instead. Even though this will drive up emissions and hobble the UK’s attempts to decarbonise its electricity generation.

It’s hard to know exactly what long-term impact data centres will have on our energy supplies and environment. 

The new, “hyperscale” data centres currently going through the planning system in the UK are vastly larger than the ones we’re used to.

The facilities planned at Elsham in Lincolnshire or Cambois in Northumberland will reportedly have a capacity of around one gigawatt. This is a colossal amount of energy. For comparison, peak electricity demand for all of Britain in August was 30 gigawatts.

Even without building new gas generation, many of the Big Tech developers have quietly admitted – in stats buried in planning applications – that their data centres will contribute huge amounts to Britain’s carbon emissions.

Elsham data centre’s developers say this site alone will produce 860,000 tonnes of CO2 every year, around five times the emissions of Birmingham international airport. That’s just one site.

Huge costs

No one, not even the government, seems to have a complete picture of all the data centres working their way through the planning system. We estimate the number is well over 100.

It is a concern that the government is so desperate to hitch its wagon to the AI frenzy, even as both the CEOs of Microsoft and OpenAI acknowledge that it may be a bubble. 

It is prepared to ignore the huge costs this will have for our climate, our already-creaking energy grid, and the households that will see their energy bills driven up by soaring data centre demand.

It should now be painfully clear to everyone that Big Tech is only interested in their share prices and pay packets - and that means building as many data centres as possible, as fast as possible.

But it’s not too late for ministers to change course.

Data centre developers must be required to put in place new, clean renewable energy capacity to power their facilities; and they must not be allowed to drain our rivers and streams to cool their computing equipment.

Ministers have the power to enforce this if they choose. The question is who they’re going to back: the Trump-Big Tech axis, or the British public?