Creating AI data centers without smart tech wastes crucial opportunities
The world is rushing to capitalize on the commercial and societal promise of AI. In the northeast of England, the recently announced Teesworks data center project promises to be Europe’s largest data center.
Across the Atlantic, Amazon’s sprawling facilities in Indiana underscore how enterprises and governments are sprinting to build infrastructure for the AI era.
The UK government’s new Compute Roadmap, for example, calls for at least 6GW of AI-ready data center capacity by 2030—triple the current national footprint—to keep pace with the US and other leading markets.
But beneath this breakneck growth, a quieter crisis is emerging. The computational demands of AI tools may be racing ahead, but the infrastructure required to support it—above all, power—is trailing behind. An urgent question must be answered: how can the grid keep up with our desire to scale AI?AI’s Boom Is Powering Up, But Can the Grid Keep Up?
Projects like Teesworks and Amazon’s Indiana buildout are part of a global rush to shore up data center capacity. Yet this rapid buildout is exposing a fundamental mismatch. Even as AI’s hunger for computing resources grows exponentially, there are high-profile harbingers of the potential bottlenecks introduced when national grids can’t keep up.
In Northern Virginia — the world’s densest cloud hub — new AI and cloud projects have had to be paused due to a lack of electricity. Over in Ireland, data centers now consume more than 20% of national electricity, prompting proposals that they build their own private power lines. The UK, meanwhile, is relaxing planning rules for new transmission towers to speed up grid upgrades.
This isn’t a problem inherent to regional infrastructures – it’s a global phenomenon brought about by putting the AI cart before the energy horse. And with AI’s runaway growth unlikely to slow down anytime soon, the focus must be on finding solutions to reduce energy demands as much as expanding grid capacity.
