As a data centre construction boom sweeps the UK, creating soaring electricity demands that threaten to decimate climate targets, opportunist politicians and commentators are using this new phenomenon to undermine the clean energy transition.

In recent months, Conservative shadow energy secretary Claire Coutinho, Reform UK’s deputy leader Richard Tice, as well as the party’s head of policy Zia Yusuf, have all claimed that we should be using fossil fuels to power the development of artificial intelligence (AI) in the UK.

Posting on social media in January following a debate in the House of Commons, Coutinho claimed that, “The AI revolution needs cheap, reliable, 24/7 energy. The biggest blocker will be [Energy and Net Zero Secretary] Ed Miliband’s fanatical approach to UK emissions.”

The UK government has committed to reaching net zero emissions by 2050 – a target passed into law by the Conservatives in 2019. 

Reform has been insisting for some time that climate targets should be abandoned in favour of AI data centre expansion.

“Net Stupid Zero means we cannot benefit from AI data centers like US & nations with low energy costs. Means we get left behind,” Tice, who has a long history of questioning climate science, claimed last August.
 
Experts have warned that this narrative is misleading and will be damaging not only to the UK’s climate ambitions, but also its economic security.
 
“Using the AI boom to justify a new dash for gas invites a massive over-reliance on volatile fossil fuels that risk locking in emissions and leading to stranded assets if demand fails to materialise as projected,” Jenny Martos, a research analyst at Global Energy Monitor, which tracks global fossil fuel development tied to data centres, told DeSmog.

A stranded asset is a piece of physical infrastructure that is underutilised or abandoned due to changing economic trends. In this case, it refers to fossil fuel infrastructure that cannot be used when the world shifts to renewable energy sources.
 
“AI and net zero are not mutually exclusive agendas, but framing the debate as such risks tethering economic developments to highly speculative energy demand scenarios,” Martos added.

Powering AI with fossil fuels is also at odds with public opinion. A poll conducted by Beyond Fossil Fuels, which campaigns for clean energy, found that 78 percent of people in the UK think data centres should only be powered by renewable energy sources.
 
“Most UK people want data centres to be regulated and powered by renewables, not jumping the queue ahead of households and public services like healthcare when it comes to access to energy and water,” Jill McCardle, a campaigner at Beyond Fossil Fuels, told DeSmog.

‘Generative’ AI platforms – including chatbots such as ChatGPT – are a huge driver of increased emissions, mainly through the construction and operation of new data centres, which deliver the significant computing capacity needed to service this burgeoning technology. For example, a query in ChatGPT requires about 10 times the computing power of a standard Google search.

The average data centre uses enough energy to power roughly 5,000 UK homes, and between 11 million and 19 million litres of water per day, the same as a town of between 30,000 and 50,000 people. There are roughly 500 data centres in the UK, with another 100 planned for the next five years.

In the United States, the mass construction of AI data centres – so voracious for energy that they can demand the equivalent power of an entire city – has been a huge gift to the gas industry. A report by Global Energy Monitor found that more than a third of new gas projects in the U.S. in the last two years have been to power AI data centres.

In July, President Donald Trump announced a $70 billion (£51 billion) AI energy funding package at a summit in Pennsylvania. Flanked by oil and gas executives, Trump celebrated American fossil fuel-powered data centres.

Meanwhile, leaders at big tech companies including Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, Amazon and Nvidia have all publicly supported the idea of relying on gas as an energy source for data centres.

They have also pledged to heavily invest in AI development in the UK as part of the £31 billion ‘Tech Prosperity Deal’ unveiled by Trump and Prime Minister Keir Starmer in September.
 
While Trump paused the deal in December, it’s unclear to what extent these investments are also on pause.

Parliamentary Squabbles

The Labour government has been keen to support homegrown data centre development, claiming that the UK needs to build its own tech infrastructure to cultivate domestic AI companies.
 
It has therefore set a target of building “at least” 6GW of new data centre capacity by 2030 – trebling the country’s current capacity, which would require enough power to supply a city six times the size of Birmingham.
 
However, in contrast to Trump’s fossil fuel-powered AI plan, the UK government has not yet announced how it intends to fulfil the energy needs of new data centres.

And so, opponents of the government’s clean energy agenda have been using this dilemma as an opportunity to hammer Labour’s net zero policies.

Energy and Net Zero Secretary Ed Miliband recently defended Labour’s focus on renewable power development on 6 January in the House of Commons, citing a 2023 report from the previous Conservative government concluding that it costs significantly more to build new gas power plants than solar or wind power in the UK.
 
To this, Coutinho addressed the question of data centre power demands, calling Miliband’s reasoning “nonsense on stilts”.
 
She added: “The biggest AI company in the world has said that it will need gas power to succeed in Britain,” referring to a comment by Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of U.S. tech giant Nvidia.
 
Coutinho rounded off by saying: “If a company wants to build its own gas plant here, at no cost to the British taxpayer, the warped green ideology of [Miliband], who is obsessed with domestic emissions above everything else, will block it. Those emissions will still exist, as that company will start somewhere, just not here in Britain.”

However, Coutinho’s AI arguments are closely tied to her party’s support for new oil and gas extraction.

Over the past year, the Conservatives – under pressure from Reform UK – have deserted their previous support for climate action, with party leader Kemi Badenoch calling the UK’s 2050 net zero target “impossible”.

Under Badenoch, the party has received extensive donations from climate science deniers and fossil fuel interests.

Coutinho has also endorsed a spate of spurious anti-climate reports this year – backing three papers authored by individuals or groups with ties to the fossil fuel industry. They claimed, among other things, that cutting emissions to net zero would cost up to “£9 trillion,” and that an electricity grid run on renewable power would cause “blackouts” – claims refuted by public bodies and independent experts.
 
She has also previously supported gas-powered AI. While serving as energy secretary in April 2024, she argued that “the rise of data centres” requires “more gas power plants where we need them”.

Coutinho’s arguments appear to have roots in the work of Steve Goreham, an “environmental researcher” at the Heartland Institute, a U.S. think tank that has been at the forefront of denying the scientific evidence for global warming. The group has recently been advising Reform UK.
 
Goreham has previously erroneously claimed: “the science clearly shows that global warming is due to natural causes, despite the tidal wave of world belief in man-made climate change.”
 
Last September, he published an article entitled, “Europe’s Impossible Choice: AI Development or Net Zero?”, where he wrote that “unless Europe abandons Net Zero and efforts to convert their power grid to wind and solar, AI will be a failure.”

However, Coutinho’s recent statements and alliances are in sharp contrast to her positions on net zero while in government. She told the BBC in October 2023, for example, that “nothing will distract us from achieving net zero or driving forward renewables.”

“Labour faces a choice”

One recent influence on Coutinho has been the energy consultant Kathryn Porter, who wrote one of the anti-net zero reports endorsed by the shadow energy secretary in January.
 
Porter, who has previously authored reports for the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the UK’s leading climate science denial group, consults for oil and gas clients.
 
In November, Porter penned a Telegraph opinion piece entitled: “Labour faces a choice: AI or Net Zero.”

In it, Porter argued “it is vital we maintain our fleet of gas power stations to meet demand” for AI data centres, and that “the most efficient way to provide power and back-up support” to them “is through a mixture of smaller gas and diesel generators.”
 
She concluded by setting up the data centre energy dilemma in stark terms, claiming the AI boom “presents a major conundrum for the Government: go all out to secure AI data centres but compromise on net zero promises, or stick to climate commitments and risk getting left behind in the global technology race.”
 
The claim that AI is an essential technology for human advancement has its challengers. According to one survey last year, entry-level jobs have plummeted by nearly a third in the UK since the introduction of ChatGPT, while another found that 95 percent of businesses are reporting “zero return” from integrating AI into their operations.

There are also concerns that the technology is enabling online harms such as the mass generation of non-consensual sexualised images on Elon Musk’s Grok, and inaccurate AI-generated medical advice. In some extreme cases, AI has advised users to commit suicide.

Despite this, Labour is facing immense pressure to approve the development of new gas power to fuel UK AI.

The Tony Blair Institute, a think tank which has deep ties to Trump-donating tech billionaire Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle, said in a July report that gas power should be a “bridging measure” to fuel data centres while renewable energy networks are developed.
 
At last year’s annual Labour conference, Sam Dumitriu, the head of policy at the right-wing think tank Britain Remade, said that gas and nuclear power would be “really important” for powering data centres in the UK.

Even Matt Clifford, the government’s former AI advisor, endorsed a report from October by the Centre for British Progress which advises the adoption of “gas now, grid and nuclear later” for data centres. In the report’s forward, Clifford called the reasoning “crucial and timely.”

When DeSmog asked the government whether it will support gas-powered AI in the future, it remained tight-lipped.

“The AI Energy Council is exploring opportunities to attract investment and support the development of clean power for data centres,” it said. “We are also working with Ofgem and network companies to reform the outdated connections process and speed up delivery of new infrastructure, freeing up grid capacity to make it easier for data centres to secure a timely connection.”