Computer Says Maybe

Alix: [00:00:00] Welcome to Computer says maybe in this short, we're gonna dive into a lawsuit that was filed this week attempting to challenge the UK government's approach to approving data centers. If you've been paying attention at all to AI politics, you know that one of the biggest questions is. If we should be building the massive data center footprint that AI companies are asserting we should, and the UK is a bit of a, I would say, frontline of some of these questions as the current UK government pushes ahead with some extremely rapid agenda to build out data center infrastructure everywhere.

Alix: The two co claimants on that lawsuit are here with me, Ollie Hayes, from Global Action Plan, and Martha Dark from Fox Glove, and we're gonna talk through what the case is about and the implications of it. Martha, do you wanna talk us through what is the suit, sort of on what grounds are you bringing the suit and why?

Martha: Sure. Thanks so much for having us. So, like you said, Fox Club and Global Action [00:01:00] Plan have together filed a legal challenge in the UK courts. Challenging the development of a hyperscale data center, so one of the massive ones, and it's called Woodlands, and it's in a part of the UK called Buckingham Shear, and it's on interestingly, what's historically been a protected bit of countryside called the green belt.

Martha: And the planning permission for this huge data center was initially rejected by the local council. The local people of Buckingham Shear said, no, thank you very much. We do not want this huge water and energy guzzling. Warehouse full of servers. But then as part of the UK government's quest to build more and more data centers here in the uk, our Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayna, overruled the local council and approved the development of the Woodlands Data Center.

Martha: Our case, quite simply, is asking for the decision to build the data center in Buckingham Chair to be reversed, and that's on grounds that the government has failed to properly assess the environmental impact that the data center would have. And also because we know that this data center will have a huge [00:02:00] impact in terms of energy and water consumption.

Martha: And this case is being brought challenging a data center in Buckingham Share, but this is about a much wider issue. It's about protecting natural resources like energy and water from big tech ultimately. And it's about ensuring the local community has a say and that local democracy is functioning as it should.

Martha: But it's also about ensuring data center expansion doesn't result in skyrocketing energy prices for people that live in that region. And it's about making sure that the UK isn't throwing its net zero and environmental commitments out of the window in the service of big tech.

Alix: It sounds like you're trying to challenge how fast the UK government is trying to do this and the roughshod way they're approaching it.

Alix: Ali, do you wanna talk a little bit about the UK's strategy on data centers? Why is the government trying to even take this approach more generally?

Ollie: Yeah, sure. I mean, with the UK already has the most data centers. Of anywhere in Western Europe, but it's really putting its foot on the accelerator in terms of saying it once more.

Ollie: It's made no secret [00:03:00] of that. The chancellor has made speeches to this effect and the government is doing a number of things to make it easier to invest in data centers and and AI infrastructure here. And the scale, as Martha said, you know, the scale of of Woodlands, which we are challenging is really big, but it is also by no means the biggest that's in the pipeline.

Ollie: They're getting bigger all the time, as you know, and the number of them being submitted to the planning processes is really accelerating as well. And what our cases really about is saying, well, hang on, at least you should be. Assessing, as Martha said, assessing the impact of these things. They just don't even do an environmental impact assessment, which we think is really wild given what we know about the enormous electricity and water needs.

Ollie: So yeah, the government is not only saying, come and build these things, they are. Overturning local democracy, as Martha has said, and that that's what they've tried to do here. And they're also making changes to the planning system itself, or at least they, they [00:04:00] want to, and to take the whole thing away from local planning authorities and into what they call the, the nationally significant infrastructure planning regime, which is basically where you designate staff as sufficiently big and important to the UK's interests that it doesn't get.

Ollie: Dealt with locally, it gets dealt with centrally, all of which is to say they're just trying to make it easier for data centers to be built. And there is a really quite shocking and, and we think fairly embarrassing, lack of scrutiny of the water and electricity and associated carbon emissions impacts.

Martha: Something we've seen time and time again since the labor government has come into power is that Labor's very much positioning big tech and AI as the solution to the UK's economic problems. And I don't doubt that there is a role for AI and perhaps indeed big tech to play in terms of the growth of the UK economy.

Martha: But as said, that can't come at the cost of our natural resources. In the uk, you know, we've been seeing big tech cozying up [00:05:00] more and more to the government, and indeed the Secretary for Science and Tech here, Peter Kyle, is now often referred to as the Honorable member for Silicon Valley. Big tech is being seen as a sort of panacea for all of the problems in the uk, and therefore pushing data centers through is seen as a central plank to that.

Martha: The government is seeing the expansion of data centers as sort of making that growth and expansion of AI in the UK possible, but it really can't come at the cost of our energy and water supplies and the local democracy systems that we have in the uk.

Alix: I mean, it also seems to go against two priorities that have been articulated by labor more generally.

Alix: Maybe not as much by Starr, but one is devolution of power. So I don't know if you're outside of the uk, you might not know the multi-decade conversation that like London shouldn't be governing all of the countries within the United Kingdom without those places having their own devolved powers. This feels antithetical to that is one thing.

Alix: The second is that doesn't this go against all of their net? Zero commitments. Like how, how could they possibly [00:06:00] meet their environmental commitments in the context of climate change if they're going so full throttle on all this infrastructure?

Ollie: That's exactly where Global Action Plan. Uh, to be honest, our first kind of interaction with our data center issues came from because you do have this very clear mission, which to their credit, the government has restated its commitment to decarbonize IE.

Ollie: Get rid of fossil fuels from the, the power system, the electricity system by the end of the decade, and to meet net zero across the whole economy by 2050. And that is just crushing head first into this enormous expansion of energy demand that is being. Provoked by the expansion of data centers and you know, it's not just researchers.

Ollie: In places like Global Action Plan thinking this, the government's own body niso, the National Energy Systems operator, has been consistently revising its projections upwards and upwards of the amount of power the data centers are going to [00:07:00] use. It's doubled them in just the last three years, basically since chat EBT came out and it now thinks that by 2050.

Ollie: Data centers alone will be using the same amount of electricity as the entire commercial sector of the UK uses today. That electricity has to be green if we're gonna meet net zero and the challenge of meeting net zero is already really, really hard because. You have to take things like home heating and surface transport, which currently use fossil fuels and electrify them.

Ollie: We're already going to have to add a massive amount of renewable electricity capacity to the grid just to do those things, and they're worth doing because they're displacing fossil fuels. But what the projections of data center growth mean is that we're going to have to add way more loads and loads more renewable capacity to just meet the demands of data centers, which aren't displacing any fossil fuels.

Ollie: They're just enabling. The major tech payers to essentially create brand new advertising machines in a way that they, they did it with [00:08:00] social media and really they're doing it with chatbots. That just seems to be totally off the radar in terms of certainly what the government is publicly saying.

Alix: I saw a quote from you talking about the case that one of the reasons you bring this suit is because you want the embarrassing reality check about the trade off.

Alix: So we're giving up all of this water energy. Political control over what, how, how those resources are used in exchange. For what exactly. Do either of you wanna talk about how you conceive of that trade off of what the UK government is saying? The public in the UK is gonna get an exchange.

Martha: I think one really clear example of where that's just not quite right is one of the sort of defenses or, or things that we are hearing often from developers.

Martha: Or from the government when they're trying to suggest to the public that the build of these data center things is going to be a positive thing, is they're often spouting these data centers will create huge numbers of jobs for local communities. But the truth is actually these are server farms and they're data centers.

Martha: They're not places where there'll be hundreds. [00:09:00] Or in some cases even tens of jobs. There'll be a few jobs, and sure there may be some in the construction, but I think we're going to see increasingly that actually the benefit to local communities is not a positive in terms of job development particularly.

Alix: Yeah. And also, I don't know if it's worth it to build such a ballooning energy suck from a country in exchange for kind of shitty technology. I haven't really seen anything from LLMs that. Appears to make it worth whatever it is. Communities are being asked to fork over at exchange. Maybe that will come, but it feels unlikely at this point.

Ollie: You know, one of our major frustrations is that. We haven't seen any kind of parameters set up by the government for how much of this infrastructure is needed and for what purpose and what trade offs they are prepared to consider because we're gonna need to build some data centers to do some important things.

Ollie: But that's not the same as saying data centers equal good, therefore more, which is kind of. The message we're getting at the moment, you know, global Action Plan. I don't wanna speak for Martha, but I'm sure the same, you know, we don't have a [00:10:00] sort of flat position of like no data centers ever anywhere, because that wouldn't make any sense.

Ollie: But I do want to see our government saying, right, you know, these are the tasks that must be done. These are the critical services that need to be developed, and they're gonna require this amount of capacity and it's gonna need. This amount of power and this amount of water, and these are the sensible places to put it.

Ollie: And these are the sectors that are gonna have to have less of that power as a result, because then that's meaningful and that's grown up. And also if it's done in a way which involves people and involves local people, as Martha was saying, that's democratic as well. But at the moment it's, you know, it's almost deliberately provocative.

Ollie: It's saying, if you are against us, then you are anti-growth, or you are, you know, you're a blocker, not a builder. That's a pretty disappointing way to sort of engage with, with your government.

Alix: Yeah.

Martha: Okay. Well what happens next with the case? So we filed the case this week. We are actually yet to receive any sort of substantive reply.

Martha: So prior to filing the case, we wrote to the government and we said, these are our concerns and would you like to [00:11:00] respond to them? Is there anything we should know? And the government chose not to reply, so we are yet to hear anything from them. We expect to in the next couple of weeks. Then there's what's called a permission stage, which is where the courts give permission for the case to proceed.

Martha: And then after that we will move forward to substantive hearings in the next stages of the case. And we are anticipating that moving pretty quickly. And if your listeners are interested in hearing more about the case or Indeed if they're interested in supporting the case, we've launched a Crowdfunder to try and cover some of the costs of the case, which can be found by searching Crowd Justice and data center.

Alix: Yeah, great. We'll also link to it in the show notes 'cause I think everyone. I hope everyone recognizes that these pieces of strategic litigation are gonna be really important in turning the tide on some of the kind of feeling of inevitability of this infrastructure expansion. And it feels, I mean, Ali, your point about this seeming intentionally provocative also feels right to me, and that if there isn't sufficient resistance to this type of provocation, I think will just seem more and more of this, which is not something I think anybody wants.

Alix: And [00:12:00]

Ollie: on that point actually, we are really keen to reach and, and support and link together communities and, and individuals who are resisting data centers where they live. 'cause that's, you know, as well as the litigation side, that that's just going to be critical. We have recently put a map on our website where we've plugged in all of the locations of the.

Ollie: Existing and planned data centers in the UK that we're aware of, and we hope that that people can take a look at that website and see if there's anything planned near them and then get in touch with us or get in touch with other people and join forces because that local campaigning, that local organized resistance is gonna be so key.

Ollie: And uh, the more that people can share, you know, experiences and skills and resources between them, the better. So yeah, do take a look at our website for that.

Alix: So I'm hearing the two things people can do is, one, go to your Crowdfunder and donate if they can, to support the case because these kinds of cases take a ton of resources and any contribution is helpful.

Alix: And two, rather than sit on the sidelines and cross our fingers that this all [00:13:00] goes how we wanna do. If you're in the uk, go to Global Action Plans website, take a look to see if there's a data center either being proposed or being built in your area and seeing if there's a way you can get involved in.

Alix: Naming the fact that maybe you don't wanna trade your drinking water for chat GPT and you would like for the government to be more responsible and basically play its role as a government and stop just acting as a handmade and of big tech. Um, and speak up and participate in some of the organizing happening to resist this expansion.

Alix: Okay. Well thanks for on such short notice, um, and what I'm sure is a very hectic week, Ali, I know you're on vacation too, so thank you for making the time to join us. And share more about this, uh, fast moving filing, uh, and also hopefully it portends something politically effective in the next few months and we're really excited to follow along.

Alix: And thank you again for all the work you do on these kinds of cases.