Why doomsday warnings are not the only threat to the AI juggernaut

There is an eerie low hum that emanates from data centres, where tens of thousands of chips make trillions of computations a second to help drive the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution.

These chips power the text, images and video generated by the queries made by the world of the advanced AI models.

Their computations, which are in effect the switching on and off of microscopic silicon transistors that make up a chip, are actually silent. But, as with all computers, almost every watt of the significant electricity powering this process leaves as heat, and the sound you can hear is the slow whir of thousands of fans required to prevent the heat from frying the racks of servers. Depending on the size of the site, you may also hear the thrum of transformers in substations channelling electricity.

In recent days, alarming warnings of threats to humanity have created a din, but it is these low hums that have stirred a backlash in the US which now threatens to envelop its mid-term elections, and could cross the Atlantic and come to the UK.

In the US, the opposition to data centres is most overt on the political left. Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders has called for a moratorium on any new construction. "People are looking around worried about how quickly the technology is moving, how little control they have over it, how will data centres impact their community in terms of electric rates and water utilisation," he told me.

It's possible that a global AI race travelling at Silicon Valley's top speeds could be about to hit the buffers of very localised political and environmental concerns.

A toxic debate

In the US, polling by Gallup published in May suggested having a data centre in your area was more unpopular than having a nuclear power station. On data centres, 71% were opposed, including 48% strongly opposed. For nuclear power stations 53% were opposed, including 34% strongly opposed. This unpopularity has grown over the past two years, with some polls suggesting half of Americans support a total pause on their construction.

There has been opposition to some of these developments in the UK too, from Buckinghamshire and Berkshire to Brick Lane in east London, with locals fearing their areas will be negatively impacted.

In Brick Lane, plans for a data centre likely to service the City of London's high frequency traders face a backlash from those who would prefer to see more social housing and local business developments in the capital's east end. Meanwhile in the shires, the sheer demand for data centres sees pressure to expand provision from Slough, into the leafy countryside.

The UK has the third highest number of data centres in the world, one spot ahead of China. The US has the most.

Back in the US, this backlash is being reflected in what politicians standing in critical elections in November are saying.

The backlash is clearly more pronounced among Democrats on the left, but anti-data-centre sentiment is clear among Republican supporters too. City councils have been voted out in response to their policies on data centres, while some whole states - both red and blue - are proposing bans.

Last year, in New Jersey and Virginia, Democratic Governors were elected partly because of a backlash against rising electricity prices blamed on data centre construction and operation.

Stories abound of local townspeople seeing energy bills soar when they are asked to foot the bill for the infrastructure needed to power new data centres, or finding their already stretched water supplies further diminished. Because the US energy system functions at a local level, the impact on bills can be immediate.

With control of both houses of the US Congress up for grabs, the scale of the hyper-localised opposition could become a defining factor in the midterm elections and with it the fate of US policy and Donald Trump's presidency.

A dizzying flip

Seven Big Tech CEOs appeared with Trump in March to sign the "Ratepayer Protection Pledge" saying they would "build, bring or buy" their own energy needs and ensure costs are not passed to "ordinary households." The pledge was non-binding.

This clearly did not go far enough for some. The new Democratic Governors in New Jersey and Virginia (home to the largest global concentration of data centres), went much further with legislation compelling new energy tariffs for data centres, and disclosure of energy and water use.

Perhaps the most potent symbol of all of this, is the pro-Trump Republican Senate candidate in Texas, Ken Paxton, attacking data centres, campaigning against their tax breaks and proposing that operators of the facilities should be criminally liable if the technology "empowered AI chatbots that undermine children's safety".

Texas had been the most pro-business, pro-data centre, pro-energy state, competing ferociously for these facilities. It had, for example, won much of the multi-billion-dollar relocation investment from Elon Musk's SpaceX AI behemoth, to produce AI chips.

It has been a dizzying flip. Jensen Huang, chief of AI chipmaker Nvidia, took to social media in August to make the case for data centres as the essential agent of US reindustrialisation. Other Big Tech CEOs have not followed, perhaps a sign of the difficult optics.

The lesson from the US however, has been that talking about benefits to the overall national economy, or potentially curing cancer, does not always cut it locally. Part of the eerie sound surrounding data centres is the relative absence of actual permanent workers coming and going. While there are plenty of construction jobs, a functioning data centre tends to require just a few dozen staff, with a few hundred at the very largest new sites.

Asking local people to accept the sound, the all night security lighting and the pressure on energy and water supplies in their areas as being for the good of the country is one thing. But it's a harder sell when the AI firms are on the cusp of trillion-dollar-plus valuations but are also expecting massive job losses, and many are asking whether the technology could wipe humans off the face of the Earth.

Critical infrastructure

The arguments have crossed the Atlantic. In Slough, Europe's greatest cluster of data centres, over 500 people signed a petition saying the town "should not become an experiment". They are questioning whether the town has benefited from this, and want a pause on data centre development in the town.

Locals have complained that the heat generated by the centres made already sweltering summer temperatures even worse. One scheme was built on a site that had been designated for 1,000 homes, but was sold to a data centre company as part of the council's attempt to clear its debts.

Back in Brick Lane, former Labour peer Baroness Pola Uddin says: "I understand the need for data centres, but there must be proper consideration of the health and wellbeing of the local population that lives, breathes, goes to school. We must consider the option of more industrial areas."

The Labour government last year designated data centres as Critical National Infrastructure, part of its strategy to help fast track their roll out.

It views data centres as underpinning public services and crucial to attract investment and allow Britain to compete in the global economy.

The argument it makes is national economic benefit, but the political challenge is whether locals will put up with it. One of the first acts of the new Labour government was to back a Buckinghamshire data centre that had been repeatedly rejected by the local council because it was going to be built on the green belt.

Permission was granted by ministers, but then challenged by campaigners after a crowdfunded court case, for failing to consider environmental impact. The Government acknowledged errors, quashed its own approval, and the developer eventually conceded it needed to agree binding clean energy obligations with the council. The victorious campaigning group, Foxglove, vowed to refocus its efforts on challenging other data centre schemes across the UK.

Water is another area of concern for campaigners. The tech industry argues its requirements are not so heavy when you consider how much water is lost to leaks, for example.

In a submission to a Commons committee the trade body Water UK criticised "not a single mention of water" in Government AI growth strategies. "There appears to be an assumption that the country will always have enough water for its economic needs. Nothing could be further from the truth."

Much of the recent UK effort to expand data centres was aimed at areas strategically chosen based on a combination of their potential contribution to the economy, the availability of brownfield sites to develop and their existing connections to energy grids and electricity generation. These areas have been dubbed AI Growth zones.

But even in these places, the political balance between growth and the environment led to hold-ups within Cabinet. A scheme in Teesside saw a tug of war between ministers over whether it should be used for a low carbon hydrogen energy scheme, or a massive new AI data centre. The data centre won out.

Environmental compromises

The Silicon Valley tech giants have acknowledged that massive AI data centre energy needs will result in slower progress on climate change. Nvidia's Huang told me last year that it was the invention and deployment of AI itself that was the initial priority, and he claimed the technology itself could help solve climate change. "This is the production of intelligence, what could be more valuable and more important than that?"

In the UK there is still a fundamental question about whether the electricity requirements of a plan to expand current data centre capacity threefold by 2030, to 6 gigawatts (GW) of continuous capacity, can be coherent with net zero plans.

The Government is expected to soon outline its policy for local government on data centres in a National Policy Statement (NPS), identifying which types qualify as "nationally significant" and are therefore eligible to be fast-tracked by the Government.

Since they started drafting the NPS, there has been a change of prime minister, and a change of political temperature on this issue.

Prime Minister Andy Burnham has pledged "growth in every postcode" and data centres might help deliver this. However the Government's prominent role is also a clear example of national centralisation of power, the opposite of Burnham's desire to give more powers to local government. Might this, plus the challenge of the Green Party's call for a data centre moratorium, alter Burnham's thinking?

'America brain'

Some in Westminster say there is a case of "America brain" about this issue where just because it is an issue in the US, people believe the same is true for the UK.

While the UK is trying to get to that 6GW figure, in the US the 2030 ambition is at least 20 times that, with some individual megaprojects to exceed total planned UK capacity.

The impact on local electricity prices is not the same, they say, though that is partly a consequence of the UK's already higher energy prices.

For the UK there is also a vital argument about data sovereignty, and avoiding total reliance on either the US or other countries for the IT infrastructure underpinning large swathes of our service economy.

There is talk of lessons needing to be learned about failing to capture the upside of the economic and political power that came from the growth in social media and the internet in the early part of this century. The UK was mainly a customer of these technologies, rather than their maker.

"This time [on AI] we have to get it right, but a precondition is having some level of data infrastructure," one minister told me. The UK's ambition is seen as relatively modest in terms of continuous AI usage for the NHS, national security and financial services by 2030.

This "skin in the game" argument is echoed in the AI labs. Some influential voices believe the impact of their models on society will be so profound that it will fundamentally affect the ability of governments to raise taxes, especially on work. Their futurologists muse about vastly disrupted flows of cash around the economy. Physical data centres may become one of the few ways to tax the proceeds of this revolution.

In the US some of the same politicians who had fought to welcome data centres now suggest they have turned on them. Tax breaks are turning into tax demands. The small-town US backlash may have specific American context, but it is also having echoes around the world.

Lead image: Reuters/AFP via Getty

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