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.
Our energy prices are also already sky high. We don’t need any more scarcity.
To be fair, we can have our own data centres without allowing them to have priority over our clean safe drinking water. It’s not just a crazy tree hugging green view that people should come before AI and data hosting (especially when the data centres are largely being used for surveillance, and not for the divestment from US data centres). This is obvious because we continue selling NHS, criminal justice and welfare data to US businesses and opting for the trans-atlantic subscription model instead of using UK companies (unless Tony Blair’s son has shares in them ofc).