Is America's data centre backlash a warning for Labour?

Welcome back to The Eye - our weekly guide to the shifting relationship between Big Tech and the state.

This week: The UK government releases its draft data centre policy, Europe mobilises against their expansion, and what Labour can learn from the Democrats’ midterm victory.

Released as part of the government’s autumn budget last week, the Department of Business, Innovation, Science and Trade (DBIST) published the initial draft of its National Policy Statement (NPS) for data centres, laying out the case for why ‘Britain must build the infrastructure that will power much of the age of AI’.

The draft policy focuses on new, much larger-scale projects, with data centres of 100MW or more now included in government’s Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project (NSIP). The DBIST has opened a consultation on the matter and will be accepting views until early January.

The statement comes against the backdrop of growing pushback from local communities against large data centre buildout throughout the country. Critics worry that the plans will undermine the UK’s emissions goals by using on-site gas-fired power, and prioritise industry interests over legitimate community and rights-based concerns. The draft policy’s heavy regulatory language has also been dubbed “utterly lacklustre” by campaigners.

The release of the NPS has also arrived imminently before two planned international days of protest against ‘Dirty Data Centres’, reflecting growing public opposition to the unfettered expansion of the projects.

The coordinated actions are taking place across 14 EU countries on the 6th and 7th of November and supported by over 85 organisations, including Global Action Plan, which has been at the forefront of the movement calling for a moratorium on rapid data centre expansion in Britain until there is much more clarity on key issues surrounding the buildout.

In the US, data centres are also one of several key issues contributing to the overwhelming blue tsunami that stormed the midterm elections, where resistance has been so great that the industry faces upheaval following a shift in the political status quo.

Draft policy ‘could have been written by Big Tech’

A key principle underpinning the government’s draft policy is data sovereignty, setting out that the UK cannot rely on overseas infrastructure to meet growing demand, and that sensitive government, health and financial data must be processed under UK regulatory and security frameworks.

The government states in the draft NPS that ‘making it easier to build must not weaken standards’, and establishes ‘robust assessment criteria, aligned with the tests set out in the government’s Data Centre Covenant’ - a document published on the same day. The covenant itself focuses on five key points, to; ‘lower electricity bills’; ‘invest in improving local communities’; ‘adhere to the highest environmental standards’; ‘create jobs, apprenticeships, and drive reindustrialisation’; and ‘strengthen Britain’s security’.

If these test areas are met, provisions will be made through a “Ministerial Control Centre” to use the “power of the state to accelerate time to power and speed up planning for the most strategic data centres”, taking decision-making power for these large scale projects away from local authorities.

Campaigners have pointed to a lack of detail in the draft policy noting that a ‘covenant with strict tests’ is only as strong as its enforcement mechanism’. They point to the draft’s vague provisions concerning data centres being ‘encouraged’ to meet requirements, arguing that “communities will be bargaining against developers backed by a ‘Ministerial Control Centre’ that will use the “power of the state to accelerate time to power and speed up the planning process for the most strategic data centres”.

Strikingly, another key element of the draft NPS, should the legal requirements and tests laid out above be met, is the “presumption of consent”, making refusal of projects deemed critical to be unlikely – with exceptions being made in the case of Green Belt sites, or in cases of unmitigable harm to habit or risk to health.

Speaking to the Citizens, Anisah Khan, Parliamentary Campaigns Manager at Global Action Plan, said that the draft policy “could have been written by Big Tech themselves” and was “clearly written with developers in mind, rather than in consultation with communities or NGOs”.

Khan explains that the adoption of the standards laid out in the covenant “is on a full voluntary basis”, adding that “any hope that the long-awaited National Policy Statement (NPS) on Data Centres would provide the clear regulatory framework needed to keep Big Tech in check was quelled with its publication, which acknowledges the range of negative impacts that data centres have on a local community, without doing anything to concretely address them”.

Further, Khan said, “Communities across the UK are already experiencing the negative impacts of living near a data centre, including exacerbated water scarcity, rising energy bills, housing shortages and loss of local nature. What’s worse, the Data Centre Covenant explicitly allows “exceptionally strategic” data centres (a category that is not defined) to be powered by heavily polluting on-site fossil gas. This is incredibly reckless”.

Resistance to their rapid expansion

As recently reported by the Guardian, the UK’s previous growth zone policy on data centres and AI - the predecessor to the draft NPS - was developed without any meetings whatsoever with environmental groups, a sharp contrast to the consultations held with 137 businesses.

Campaigners in Slough have more recently accused the government of ignoring the concerns of residents, arguing that it had failed to meaningfully engage with communities in the area, which already hosts one of the biggest concentrations of data centres in Europe. There are currently multiple open petitions seeking to make the government more accountable to the public before it continues with its plans for rapid expansion of data centre buildout.

One petition, calling for a UK-wide public consultation before further expansion, currently sits at over 16,700 signatures, citing ‘impacts on wildlife, habitats, water, energy use, emissions, land and local communities are properly understood and addressed in full’.

Global Action Plan is drumming up support for its own active petition, highlighting that 50GW of data centres are now requesting grid connection: ‘5GW more than UK peak winter electricity demand and 44 GW more than Government estimates of future demand’.

That petition has reached nearly 9,000 signatures, reflecting ongoing battles between local communities and national governments in a number of countries, as states increasingly prioritise the demands of AI’s resource-intensive infrastructure in pursuit of economic growth.

Speaking to the Citizens, Khan concludes that what Britain needs more than ever is “a robust, needs-based framework that sets out how many data centres we need, what for, how local voices will be meaningfully heard, and how data centres’ cumulative environmental impact will be kept consistent with legally binding carbon targets and an increasingly water-scarce country”. Her organisation, and many other activist groups, continue calling for a moratorium on data centre construction until such a point is reached.

In the US, following a sweeping Democratic victory that saw the party take back both the House and Senate, states like Texas - already facing rising costs and depleted resources as as result of hyperscaled buildout - have turned blue.

Texas’s incoming governor, Gina Hinojosa, has vowed to go even further than her Republican predecessor, Greg Abbott, on data centres. Like campaign groups internationally, Hinojosa has called for a complete moratorium, pledging to halt approvals until there is “a legislative session that puts Texans first so that we don’t have any more communities in Texas who are powerless against these global corporations”.

The political swing is already affecting AI futures stock and threatening to alter the landscape that has allowed AI data centres to be built and proposed on such a vast scale, amid widespread public opposition across the US.

About The Eye: In an era where Silicon Valley is rewriting the rules of governance and unaccountable tech companies are capturing our public services from the inside out, The Eye exists to follow the power, connect the dots and reveal how technology is reshaping our state.