TL;DR
On Tuesday 29 September Prime Minister Andy Burnham unveiled GB Grid (Great British Grid), a state-owned company sitting within Great British Energy and set up to compete with existing network operators. Businesses will be allowed to build their own connections, with GB Grid able to co-invest. For data centre developers stuck in a years-long queue for power, that could be a new way through.
What is changing
No state-owned company has put money into the country’s power networks since they were privatised; GB Grid would be the first. Burnham said firms repeatedly told him they could not expand because they could not get connected, and that the delay “pushes costs up” and “holds Britain back”. The new body is meant to add competition, lower costs and shorten connection times.
The detail is still missing. The government has not said how GB Grid will fit with Ofgem, NESO and the incumbent network owners, or how a self-built connection would interact with Ofgem’s planned fee for large data centre applicants.
Why data centres care
According to Ofgem figures cited by City AM, the queue to connect new demand to the grid roughly tripled in seven months, reaching 125GW in June 2025 against 41GW the previous November. At least 80GW of that is data centres, though the regulator gives a figure of about 73GW in other consultation papers. In July Ofgem proposed a commitment fee and stricter progress milestones to weed out speculative schemes; its consultation has closed and a decision is awaited.
Andreas Rathmann, utilities director at operator CyrusOne, welcomed more competition but said the industry still needed certainty that power would be there when projects were ready.
The pattern on the ground
Power is where UK AI infrastructure keeps getting stuck. Nscale’s Essex site, billed as Britain’s largest AI supercomputer, could wait until the 2030s for a connection. Meanwhile new schemes keep joining the pipeline, including a record 1,000MW application at Chapelcross, reported this week.
Letting developers build their own connections helps with the wiring, but not with the generation and network capacity behind it. A shorter route to the substation does not create more megawatts.
Looking forward
The useful signals will be GB Grid’s operating rules, Ofgem’s decision on the commitment fee, and whether the two are designed together. For businesses planning compute-heavy AI projects in the UK, grid access remains the critical-path item, and nothing announced this week changes that in the short term.