The AI Opportunities Action Plan – the push for data centres

This month the Government unveiled its plans to “shape the AI revolution” through its AI Opportunities Action Plan (the AI Plan). 

The AI Plan sets out the Government’s intention for the UK to become a global leader in AI which in turn it believes will engineer economic growth. To accomplish this the AI Plan acknowledges that we need to build “sufficient, secure and sustainable AI infrastructure” including:

• Computational power (“Compute”) owned by the public sector – to assist with national priorities;
• Privately owned Compute based in the UK – which will create jobs, investment and new AI services; and
• International Compute – to facilitate joint AI research with international partners.

In order to achieve this the AI Plan makes the following recommendations:

• the Government should set out, within the next six months, the UK’s long-term plan for AI infrastructure;
• AI Growth Zones (“AIGZ”) should be established to facilitate data centre construction – which should help to rejuvenate post-industrial areas;
• a planning use-class for data centres should be created – intended to accelerate growth; and
• relief schemes should be applied to incentivise private investment in the sector. 

The Government has already made it clear that data centre build out is firmly on its agenda – as seen in the budget and publication of “Invest 2025” (which we wrote about here), alongside changes to the National Planning Policy Framework (which we wrote about here) – and the AI Plan bolsters this further. 

Whilst the AI Plan describes the Government’s desire “to shape the AI revolution” to drive economic growth, it is possible that it will remain an idealistic vision curtailed by a lack of available electricity capacity. We already know that power is a key constraint to new data centre developments and the AI Plan doesn’t go into detail as to the Government’s vision to drive power generation through either fossil or renewable sources. Instead, the AI Plan pins its hopes on the use of AIGZs drawing on existing energy capacity located in post-industrial towns and the devolved nations. Whilst repurposing former manufacturing facilities (similar to the mooted data centre at the former Ford factory in Bridgend, Wales), can be seen as desirable for regional economic regeneration, it is arguable that the purported AI revolution needs to be driven by developing new power capacity alongside fibre connectivity, particularly to meet overall green targets. Without addressing these fundamental requirements, the AI Plan may just remain a vision undermined by known structural issues. In many ways it will be interesting to see if renewables across all variants can step up to plug the current capacity gap in the short-medium term and even supercharge the AI revolution in the long-term. Green hydrogen as an option is certainly being considered and it’s a space that we’re excited to see develop.