TL;DR
The Green party leader has called for construction of large AI data centres to stop, exempting only small sites serving their own communities. The government rejected it outright, arguing a pause would export the investment and leave health and defence workloads running on foreign computers. The exchange marks data centre policy crossing from planning committees into party politics.
The two positions
Zack Polanski’s language is deliberately unsubtle: he wants ministers to “slam the brakes on these energy-guzzling, water-guzzling datacentres”. His sharpest objection is to the critical national infrastructure designation Labour granted the sector, which he calls outrageous — for most people, he argues, the term covers hospitals, water and electricity, not artificial intelligence.
The timing gives the argument force. Britain is in one of its worst droughts for years, and data centres already draw about 2.5% of national electricity, a figure forecast to quadruple by 2030.
The government’s rebuttal runs on jobs and sovereignty: halting construction would “simply send investment and good jobs abroad, while leaving Britain dependent on overseas computing for the processing of sensitive health and defence data”. Officials also pushed back on what the designation actually does, saying it grants no priority claim on water or power and does not place operators ahead of households when supply tightens. In England, they note, the sector accounts for under 1% of non-household water use.
Why this is now electoral
Data centre siting was a live issue in the US midterms and is following the same path here. Objections have surfaced in Fife and Buckinghamshire, in Cardiff and down in Devon, over noise, heat, traffic and property values, and the Scottish government appears to be edging towards a moratorium of its own under voter pressure. That pressure is not only environmental: as we report separately today, the STUC has entered the argument from the industrial-strategy side, wanting a national plan rather than a ban.
Ministers are not conceding nothing. The AI minister, Kanishka Narayan, ties capacity to sovereignty, and the government says refusing a pause is not “a blank cheque for big tech”, expecting developers to use clean power, use water responsibly and invest in host communities.
Looking forward
The campaign group Foxglove has identified where that promise could unravel: developers facing long grid connection queues are proposing their own gas-fired generation, which Rosa Curling’s team calls a backward step on climate. Britain’s earlier coverage of Newport and Cardiff showed grid requests tripling. If self-generation becomes the standard workaround, “clean power” becomes an expectation with no mechanism attached.