Mr Viral
The British government is pressing ahead with “AI Growth Zones” amid fears the rush to build datacenters to power AI could backfire and leave the countryside littered with expensive high-tech “white elephants.”
Local and regional authorities were asked this week to put their communities forward to become “dedicated hotbeds for AI infrastructure development” and “attract millions in private investment,” as part of the AI Opportunities Action Plan first detailed last month.
UK prepared to throw planning rules out the window for massive datacenters
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In particular, the game plan is to focus on de-industrialized areas of the country that have “land and infrastructure standing ready for redevelopment” to become hotbeds of AI Growth Zones.
Interest is “already building,” or so we are told, for high-potential locations in Scotland, Wales, and the North East and North West regions of England.
Ideal candidates will have sites with “large existing power connections (with a current capacity of 500-plus MW) or a clear vision on how energy capacity can be increased,” according to Scotland Office Minister Kirsty McNeill, or they will be suitable sites for energy infrastructure such as nuclear reactors, solar stations and wind farms, or battery storage.
The Register understands that at least one datacenter project under consideration is at a decommissioned power station, which has the advantage of an existing connection to the electricity grid, and may be quicker to bring online than building a server farm from scratch.
Not all of “AI Growth Zones” are expected to be housed in de-industrialized areas. The first one announced last month will be in Culham, Oxfordshire, home to the UK’s Atomic Energy Authority. Not surprisingly, this site will also serve as a “testing ground to drive forward research on how sustainable energy like fusion can power our AI ambitions,” the government said at the time.
We asked the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology (DSIT), which is overseeing the AI Opportunities Action Plan, if anything else was in the offing for this rural area – such as a massive AI datacenter campus or three, perhaps?
A spokesperson told us the department was not in a position to disclose details at this stage. This won’t be reassuring for the folk of Culham (population 453), or the nearby village of Clifton Hampden (population 662), which is actually closer to the Atomic Energy Authority site at Culham Science Centre, especially as AI Growth Zones introduce measures aimed at “speeding up planning permission” – meaning that local objections are likely to be simply overruled.
We also asked the local Member of Parliament if he was aware of any plans to erect data facilities in the area and whether he was happy with these, but no response was received by the time of publication.
While bit barns are a crucial part of the modern technological economy, building more in haste may not deliver the desired results.
“Creating more datacenters will not necessarily lead to higher AI usage in the UK. Certainly, when it comes to the use of AI in public services, there are no clear timelines on how quickly the technology can be implemented, and there is a risk that the impact of AI may be far less than expected,” TechMarketView Principal Analyst Simon Baxter previously said.
This point was raised in a panel discussion at the AI Action Summit in Paris this week, where Alexander Vollert, CEO of AXA Group Operations, claimed AI solutions that have worked well are based on task-specific “classic” AI models rather than the large language models (LLMs), on which all the recent hype and investment has centered.
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Small wonder that one government insider, talking on the condition of anonymity, told The Reg there is a fear that the government’s push for AI datacenter construction may not deliver on expectations, leaving costly high-tech “white elephants” all over the country.
Dr Sasha Luccioni, a research scientist at Hugging Face and another Paris panel member, warned that the energy required for AI is “becoming a point of tension between citizens and datacenters.” This is particularly so in Ireland, where 21 percent of the country’s electricity was consumed by these datacenters during 2023.
This could be exacerbated by the fact that bit barns actually deliver very little employment in the local area, once all the construction has finished and the site becomes operational. On average, datacenters create just 30 to 50 permanent positions, while larger facilities may employ up to 200 people. The UK government’s own announcement refers to “thousands of new jobs” being created and spread across the entire country.
Investigative journal Private Eye notes in its latest issue (No. 1642) that among those standing to benefit from all this AI investment will be “a series of AI businesses” managed by Entrepreneur First, which is controlled by Matt Clifford, the man who was hired to create the government’s AI Opportunities Action Plan.
Following any expressions of interest from local and regional authorities, the government said it will open the formal selection process in the spring, with the first batch of “AI Growth Zones” to be announced in the summer.
We suspect the local citizens can’t wait for builders to start constructing houses for their new AI overlords. ®
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