UK warned about data center need, again

The UK needs more data centers to keep up with AI demand – this is according to one digital infrastructure company that warns the country could lose its leadership in technology without the right investment.

Earlier this year, Google said that the UK was at risk of being left behind in AI without more data centers, a call that the UK government has appeared to heed, designating data centers as “critical national infrastructure”.

The UK doesn’t have a shortage of data centers: there are more than 500 across the country, making it second only to the US with more than 5,000 and Germany with a handful more than the UK.

“We are under pressure to be able to provide capacity and create data center buildings to fuel the demand from AI, that’s the challenge,” Spencer Lamb, Kao’s chief commercial officer, told Sky News. “Whether we as a country provide the environment for it is the big question mark.”

Location, location, location

But what’s key now is building powerful systems with sufficient performance for the booming AI sector in affordable locations with access to sustainable power, as such infrastructure chews through huge amounts of energy. One report suggested data centers chew through 1.4 % of electricity in the UK, but that’s predicted to increase fivefold over the next ten years.

Lamb noted that the UK needs a plan – suggesting that when cloud computing started a decade ago, there wasn’t an infrastructure plan in place, which has led to a large number of data centers in the South East, particularly centered on the west of London, leading to a power drain in the area.

“Now is the time to come up with a UK-wide data center strategy and start deploying these facilities in other parts of the country, distributing them fairly,” he added.

That said, growth is starting to happen outside of the South East, including a £10 billion site in Northumberland.

London focus remains

That warning follows another from data center giant Digital Realty, which told City AM that London in particular needs to boost its infrastructure.

“I really just think for the UK, but particularly London, it’s one of the biggest opportunities I could see happening,” managing director Séamus Dunne told the business newspaper. “Europe, unfortunately, overall is not going fast enough, which means they’re falling behind the development of these technologies, particularly generative AI, versus the United States and China, who are already streets ahead.”

Dunne noted that training of AI can happen anywhere, but for the application of AI, known as inference, it needs to be more closely located to businesses — hence the need for London data centers. “The real development of the infrastructure has to be for inference, and it has to be first in London,” Dunne told City AM. “That’s where it’s going to get used.”

Data center projects are in the works inside London and near to the capital, including one in the borough of Newham along the Thames. While concerns remain about power and water use, the other proposed use for that site was as a lorry depot, so a data center is perhaps an easier sell to local residents.

However, other areas have seen pushback from local people unhappy about the rise of digital infrastructure in their neighborhoods – Google’s £800m data center in Waltham Cross has angered residents, one of whom said “it has ruined everything” – highlighting the need to get the location right for data centers to enable the growth of AI.