£1bn investment aims to build UK’s first fully renewable-powered data centre network

FUTURE data centres in the UK could be powered entirely through domestic renewable energy, according to AI firm Carbon3.ai, which has committed £1bn (US$1.3bn) to build the necessary infrastructure.

The newly founded company wants to build a “sovereign AI infrastructure network” in the UK by repurposing existing industrial and energy assets into advanced data centres.

Tom Humphreys, CEO of Carbon3.ai, said: “It’s not enough to invest in data centres, we need a national backbone for AI that’s owned, powered and secured right here at home. “Our goal is to ensure that British enterprise, researchers and public institutions have access to world-class compute capacity without relying on foreign-controlled infrastructure.”

Powering AI

A diverse energy mix is currently required to power the world’s data centres, whose electricity demand is projected to exceed 1,000 TWh per year by 2030. Around half of this demand is expected to be met by renewable energy, with the remainder supplied by fossil fuels and nuclear power.

In recent years, major technology companies have increasingly relied on fossil fuels to meet the rapidly growing energy needs of AI systems and data centres. This shift reflects the ongoing challenges associated with renewable energy, including limited availability and the high costs of battery and energy-storage infrastructure.

Next steps

Carbon3.ai aims to overcome energy bottlenecks with its investment, which it says reflects the estimated cost of converting 50 MW of renewable baseload generation into data centre capacity. It has already committed £65m to the programme. Earlier this week, the company launched its first compute programme powered by renewable energy.

It has also submitted plans for an “AI factory” in Derbyshire that will focus on critical computing infrastructure and draw its power from a nearby Valencia Energy Centre site, which converts landfill gas into renewable energy.