MarkZero

The Budget’s AI headline sounds great. Here’s what’s behind it. The Chancellor launched a “Data Centre Covenant”, pitched as Britain leading on AI and keeping NHS and military data “under British control”. But look closer. 1. They get to jump the queue. Britain’s power grid is jammed. Homes and factories wait years for a connection. Data centres are the biggest cause of that jam: 73GW of a 125GW queue, much of it speculative. Their reward? Ministers can now reserve grid capacity for them and reassign it to them. 2. They barely employ anyone. Once it’s running, a new AI data centre creates around one permanent job per megawatt of power, on one think tank’s estimate. A car plant creates around 400. Every megawatt given to a data centre is a megawatt not powering a factory. 3. The money leaves. Most of what a data centre costs is chips and servers, designed in America and made in Taiwan. Australia also makes no chips, and there imports wiped out about 85% of the growth boost from its data centre boom. 4. “British control” is a slogan. NHS England’s data platform is run by the US firm Palantir, on a £330m contract. The MoD gave Palantir another £240m without a competitive tender. The new data centres will largely be US-owned too, and US law can force US companies to hand over data wherever their servers sit. So what’s sold as Britain leading the world and protecting our data turns out to be British land, British grid and British data, generating American profits, with American firms still holding the keys. Meanwhile, the real British businesses, the ones that actually employ people, are left waiting in the queue for power. That isn’t sovereignty. It’s being a tenant in our own house.