Virtus Raises Alarm Over London’s Aging Power Grid Impeding UK’s AI Ambitions

A business has cautioned the UK energy regulator that London’s power grid is facing difficulties in accommodating additional data centers, which could discourage potential investments and hinder Britain’s aspirations in technology such as AI.

“The combination of the immediate lack of power and future power delays prevents us from growing our business in the South East of England by adding new sites,” wrote Peter Betts, director of engineering at Virtus Data Centers Ltd. It “prevents the region from benefiting from future technological developments in areas such as artificial intelligence, an area where the UK wants to become a global center of excellence.”

Power shortages in southeast England have stalled about 500 million pounds ($636 million) of investment in new data center facilities, Betts said as part of a letter sent to regulators by industry union TechUK.

Server farms are one of many industries being delayed by the UK’s lack of power. Much of the new electricity generation comes from offshore wind farms off the coast of Scotland, which are difficult to move down south.

National Grid Oyj and the state gas and electricity market agency have blamed each other for the slow construction of new grid connections, which also complicates residential construction and has led to queues of more than a decade for some projects. Earlier this month, the grid operator said it was ready to turn on all planned generation capacity from the queue, which is not moving quickly, to make room for other projects.

“If the UK is to continue to be a major player in AI and other emerging technologies, we need the infrastructure to support these innovations,” TechUK’s Deputy Director of Policy Neil Ross said. “Slow and expensive access to electricity puts this at risk and halts the construction of infrastructure from data centers to telecommunications networks and semiconductor manufacturing.”

An Ofgem spokesman said connection delays were a “major obstacle” to building new data centers and other power-hungry projects, which required “urgent” policy reform.

“We recognize the frustration some of our customers are experiencing with their connections,” Julian Leslie, network manager at the TSO, said earlier this year. “We decided to meet the challenges with the current process, which was not designed to work at the scale of the current applications.”