The boss of the organisation behind Britain’s first AI growth zone has said he has “exciting plans” for the science campus on which it will be built after it was unveiled as a future hub for artificial intelligence in a government report.
Tim Bestwick, who was appointed the UK Atomic Energy Authority’s Chief Technology Officer and Director of Strategy, Communications & Business Development in 2018, told UKTN the government agency had already begun the process of identifying a commercial partner for the design of data centres to be constructed at the UKAEA’s home in Oxfordshire.
The site, known as the Culham Campus, has been identified as the first of a number of so-called ‘AI Growth Zones‘ under entrepreneur Matt Clifford’s AI Opportunities Action Plan, under which normal planning rules will be waived to encourage clusters of innovative AI startups to set up shop there.
The centre, in the small village of Culham near the city of Oxford, was previously the home of JET, an experimental nuclear reactor, which is now in the process of being decommissioned.
Read more: Welcome to Culham: Inside the weird village home to the UK’s first-ever AI growth zone
The decommissioning means the huge power consumption of JET has now been freed up for use by other projects, including data centres which are known for their high power demands. The campus has its own 400KV powerline connection to the national grid, providing it with enough power for tens of thousands of homes.
Bestwick said being granted the designation of an AI Growth Zone would also allow the UKAEA access to the high levels of compute power needed to help model designs for nuclear fusion reactors, critical for its long-term mission of opening the UK’s first nuclear fusion power plant in the 2040s.
“We very much had thought of this as the coming together of two opportunities, one is our need to do lots of big compute for what we want to achieve anyway, and the other the opportunity to reuse our electrical connectivity and some of our land,” Bestwick told UKTN.
“Regardless of being an AI growth zone we have already identified long ago that having access to major compute capability and the latest techniques in machines is important to our future.
“In fact the compute requirements and simulation requirements of fusion are quite daunting, it’s a very sophisticated challenges, and we already knew we needed it, and we have a team in our advanced computing who work on the very big machines and do the very big simulations. But the machines aren’t here — we have a very modest compute capability of our own — so the idea of having one that we have enhanced access to is very exciting.
“We have really exciting plans for this campus, we are very much on the track of turning Culham into a vibrant mixed commercial research public-private campus where there are lots of organisations working closely together doing really important technological things, with a strong focus on fusion and we see being involved in AI and high performance computers to be part of that.”
The plans come amid a boom in the number of planning applications for data centres, which rose as much as 40% in the UK in 2024 as cloud companies raced to catch up with ever-growing demand for compute in AI.
An analysis by UKTN tracked nearly 200 planning applications for data centres across more than 250 local authorities in England and Wales between 2020 and 2024. The analysis identified at least 38 separate applications for the construction of data centres in 2024, a rise of 40.7% compared to the previous year.
That figure remains down on the 50 applications identified in 2020, a record year, but likely amounts to significantly more compute power than the applications made during that year, owing to the increased size, footprint and prospective energy consumption featured in the designs of more recent plans.
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