Times on Construction of Data Centres

Today’s News at: http://www.no2nuclearpower.org.uk/category/news/

 AI

 Inside the power-hungry data centres taking over Britain. Our thirst for
AI is fuelling a new construction wave: of giant data centres. But can our
electricity and water systems cope — and what will the neighbours say?
Plants [like the one] run by the company Stellium on the outskirts of
Newcastle upon Tyne, are springing up across the country. There are already
more than 500 data centres operating in the UK, many of which have been
around since the Nineties and Noughties. They grew in number as businesses
and governments digitised their work and stored their data in outsourced
“clouds”, while the public switched to shopping, banking and even
tracking their bicycle rides online. But it was in 2022, when a nascent
technology company called OpenAI launched ChatGPT, that the world woke up
to the potential of AI and large language models to change the way the
planet does, well, just about everything. It can do this thanks largely to
advances in chip design by the US company Nvidia — now the world’s most
valuable (and first $5 trillion) business. The trouble is, a typical
ChatGPT query needs about ten times as much computing power — and
electricity — as a conventional Google search. This has led to an
explosion in data centres to do the maths. Nearly 100 are currently going
through planning applications in the UK, according to the research group
Barbour ABI. Most will be built in the next five years. More than half of
the new centres are due to be in London and the home counties — many of
them funded by US tech giants such as Google and Microsoft and leading
investment firms. Nine are planned in Wales, five in Greater Manchester,
one in Scotland and a handful elsewhere in the UK. The boom is so huge that
it has led to concerns about the amount of energy, water and land these
centres will consume, as residents in some areas face the prospect of
seeing attractive countryside paved over with warehouses of tech. Typically
these centres might use 1GW (1,000MW) of electricity — more power than is
needed to supply the cities of London, Birmingham and Manchester put
together.

 Times 29th Nov 2025 

 https://www.thetimes.com/business/technology/article/inside-britains-ai-data-centre-boom-can-the-grid-keep-up-jllzb3b0p