Almost half (44%) of all new data centres in the UK are expected to be dedicated to AI workloads over the next five years, new figures suggest, in the latest sign of a surge in the compute demands of the technology.
Britain is expected to massively scale its data centre capabilities, with the prime minister declaring the facilities “critical national infrastructure”, the same designation given to water and energy.
According to a survey of 1,300 data centre network planners from Ciena, demand for data bandwidth in the UK is likely to grow as much as six times over the next five years.
Much of this demand will be driven by AI, which requires huge amounts of data to train models and substantial computational resources to run – a single ChatGPT query is estimated to use 10 times more energy than a Google search.
“AI workloads are reshaping the entire data centre landscape, from infrastructure builds to bandwidth demand,” said Jürgen Hatheier, international CTO at Ciena.
“Historically, network traffic has grown at a rate of 20-30% per year. AI is set to accelerate this growth significantly, meaning operators are rethinking their architectures and planning for how they can meet this demand sustainably.”
The government’s AI Opportunities Action Plan – the flagship AI strategy from the technology department – has advocated a three-pronged approach to scaling the country’s data capacity through a small amount of state-owned facilities, increased investment from private firms and through international compute-sharing agreements.
Research from UKTN found that planning applications for new data centres in England and Wales jumped 40% in 2024.
Read more: AI Action Plan: Where could Matt Clifford’s AI growth zones be located?
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