Has the UK’s AI infrastructure buildout been a success?
QTS’s data center in Cambois, North East of England
When the U.K. announced its AI Opportunities Action Plan — a grand blueprint to deploy the tech across society — in January, Prime Minister Keir Starmer declared the strategy would make the country an “AI superpower.”
One of the key pillars of this plan was a rapid buildout of data centres capable of providing the huge compute requirements for the rollout of AI. This would be driven by “AI growth zones” — designated areas with relaxed planning permission and improved access to power.
Nearly one year on, and Nvidia, Microsoft, and Google have all committed billions of dollars to AI infrastructure in the country. Four AI growth zones have been unveiled, and homegrown startups like Nscale have emerged as key players in the space.
But critics point to heavily restricted access to energy via the national grid and slow-moving buildouts as signs the country is at risk of lagging further behind global rivals in the AI race.
“Ambition and delivery are not yet aligned,” Ben Pritchard, CEO of data center power supplier AVK, told CNBC.
“Growth has been held back largely by constraints around power availability. Grid bottlenecks, in particular, have slowed the pace of development and mean the U.K. is not yet deploying infrastructure quickly enough to keep pace with global competitors.”
Grid connection delays
It is still early days in the U.K.’s AI infrastructure buildout as AI growth zones are currently in their initial phases of development.
A site in Oxfordshire, the first to be announced in February, has yet to begin building work and is still considering delivery partner proposals. Ground preparation work has begun at one in the North East of England, announced in September, with formal building beginning early 2026.
Two more sites, in North and South Wales were unveiled in November. The former is searching for an investment partner, which the Department of Science, Technology and Innovation (DSIT) told CNBC it expects to be confirmed in the coming months. The latter is made up of a cluster of sites, some of which are already operational with additional construction work to be done on others, DSIT said.
The U.K. government said in July it was targeting a core group of AI growth zones serving at least 500 megawatts of demand by 2030, with at least one scaling to more than one gigawatt by that time.
But the most serious challenge to realising those ambitions is the U.K.’s limited grid capacity, said Pritchard.
“Developers expect grid connection delays of eight to ten years, and the volume of outstanding connection requests, especially around London, is unprecedented,” he told CNBC.
AI workloads are also “dramatically increasing energy demand” as businesses and consumers begin to use the tech, putting additional pressure on a stretched energy system, Pritchard added. “They are no longer isolated risks; they are actively slowing down or blocking developments across the country.”
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