Labour has rejected calls to pause construction of major AI infrastructure in Britain after the Green party leader, Zack Polanski, said it was time to “slam the brakes on these energy-guzzling, water-guzzling datacentres”.
The government hit back at the opposition party’s proposal of a “moratorium other than [for] local-scale datacentres for the local community”, saying it “would be a disaster for jobs and national security”.
The Greens’ call for a pause comes amid one of the UK’s worst droughts in years and predictions that datacentres’ electricity use, now standing at about 2.5% of the UK’s supply, will rise fourfold by 2030.
Datacentres contain the processing chips that power billions of AI prompts every day and Labour has designated them as critical national infrastructure, a decision Polanski called “outrageous”. “To most people critical infrastructure means hospitals, water, electricity,” he said. “It doesn’t mean artificial intelligence.”
He added: “Right now the government is putting our communities, our water security and our climate ambitions second to the demands of tech giants.”
A spokesperson for the government said: “A pause on building new datacentres would simply send investment and good jobs abroad, while leaving Britain dependent on overseas computing for the processing of sensitive health and defence data.”
They said critical national infrastructure status did not give datacentres priority access to water or electricity, nor did it automatically put them ahead of households during shortages, and that in England datacentres’ water usage represented less than 1% of non-household water consumption.
The row comes amid increasing signs that datacentre policy, already a major political issue in the US midterm elections, is rising up the agenda in Britain. In energy- and water-rich Scotland, the Scottish National party government appears to be “inching towards a moratorium” amid voter pressure, while local disputes have erupted from Devon to Buckinghamshire and Cardiff to Fife where residents have raised fears about noise, heat, traffic and the visual impact of datacentres affecting house prices.
The AI minister, Kanishka Narayan, has linked the need for more AI datacentres to strong defence and this month claimed the British public “doesn’t just want foreign billionaires to own things that matter to our lives. If we’re being true to those British values, it is impossible to achieve that without building a sovereign level of datacentre capacity.”
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The government spokesperson said its refusal to pause development “does not mean a blank cheque for big tech or that every datacentre should be approved”. They said developers should “prioritise clean power, use water responsibly, create British jobs and supply chains, and provide investment to the communities in which they are built”.
The tech equity campaign group Foxglove warned that with some datacentre developers seeking to mitigate long waits to connect to the energy grid by planning their own gas-fired power stations, there was a risk of a “deeply alarming backward step on climate action”.
Rosa Curling, its co-executive director, said: “It’s good to hear that the government thinks there shouldn’t be a ‘blank cheque’ for big tech’s datacentres. But without urgent action, that’s exactly what will happen – the public and the planet will be left to foot the bill for the environmental and social costs of these energy-hungry giants.”
