UK Minister Backs Data Center Expansion Despite Growing International Backlash To The Technology

The UK will continue to build data centers to match the pace of AI adoption within the British economy in spite of the growing opposition to data centers amongst the American electorate, the UK's growth minister has said.

"As AI becomes more widely used across our economy, Britain will need more of the data centres that support it. But we won't allow that growth to come at any cost," Dan Tomlinson told the Financial Times on Saturday.

However, the UK politician insisted that London had learned important lessons from the data center "free-for-all in parts of the U.S." and suggested that UK could avoid the kind of "polarizing debate" over the issue if construction of the centers is conditional on investment into local communities, job creation and community consent.

"Move too quickly without bringing communities with you, and people understandably start worrying about the impact on their area and asking what they're getting in return," Tomlinson added.

Across the Atlantic, backlash towards data centers has indeed been growing. In Tuesday's midterm elections, which saw the Democrats win a landslide and flip the House and Senate blue, voters in at least 38 jurisdictions supported measures restricting or outright blocking data centers.

Every data center moratorium that was on the ballot was approved with the exception of one in Hardwood, North Dakota - a town of less than 1000 people.

Democratic gubernatorial candidates supporting moratoriums on data centers or more stringent regulation also won in Texas, Ohio and Georgia.

In exit polls conducted by NBC News, 56% of voters said that AI and data centers played a "crucial" or "major" role in determining how they voted, and a further 76% said they would oppose the construction of a new data center in their local community.

The Democrats were the clear beneficiaries of this anti-data center sentiment; Republican President Donald Trump has previously called widespread opposition to AI and data centers a "sick conspiracy."

However, this skepticism towards AI and data centers specifically is not confined to the U.S.; coordinated protests against data centers in 16 countries were organized for Friday and Saturday. Dutch activists even broke into the construction site of a Microsoft data center on Friday.

Most opponents of the expansion of data centers cite their large consumption of electricity and water, their supposedly unsightly appearance, their construction without public consent and concerns about the accelerated development of AI in global and local economies and societies as the main reasons for disapproving of the facilities.

Nevertheless, Tomlinson pointed out that the UK is not at the forefront of AI investment; according to the Center for Economic Policy Research, AI investment in the U.S. in 2026 will total $280 billion, compared to the UK's $25 billion.

"Our problem [in the UK] is not that we have an abundance of data center construction that our politics needs to reckon with, it's that the build-out is slower here than it could be. The pace of investment here is, frankly, too low for what we need to stay at the forefront as AI technology develops," Tomlinson argued.