UK government doesn't know what its datacentres are used for, FoI request shows
nordicinst · x · 2026-09-02
A Guardian report reveals the UK government lacks basic information about what the country's datacentres are used for: in response to a freedom of information request, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology said it did "not hold the requested information." The ministry has since been dissolved.
- Hundreds of datacentres await planning permission, and 315 are queueing to connect to the National Grid
- In January, ministers announced qualifying datacentres could opt into the Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project scheme, bypassing local planning committees — campaigners say this "insulates" projects from local scrutiny
- Green party leader Zack Polanski accused ministers of wanting to "steamroller" local opposition
- Concerns centre on the environmental impact of the AI boom outpacing transparency and justification
More from Infra
- One LLM already runs at 14,000 tokens/sec—frontier intelligence at 5,000 tok/s within 5 years? — dolo937 · 2026-09-02
- Compute, intelligence and robots will decide which countries get rich — Dr_Singularity · 2026-09-02
- DLSS 5 neural rendering applied to GTA6: 'You're not ready for this' — petewoodbridge · 2026-09-02
- "AGI runs on your laptop": local quantized model demo thanks Unsloth — LeviTurk · 2026-09-02
- Data Center Boom Flips Construction Order: Steel Design Must Now Precede Civil Engineering — MatthewChang · 2026-09-02
- musl mallocng vs. jemalloc: memory allocator comparison shared — DanielLockyer · 2026-09-02