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\t\tData centres are consuming six per cent of all UK electricity\t<\/p>\n\t\t\tThursday 14 May 2026 5:00 am
\n\t\t\t\t\t\u00a0|\u00a0\u00a0Updated:\u00a0<\/p>\n
\t\t\tWednesday 13 May 2026 4:32 pm\n\t<\/p>\n
\t\tData centres are consuming six per cent of all UK electricity\t<\/p>\n
UK data centre emissions forecasts have been revised upward 100-fold. London\u2019s server farms already consume more power than all its households combined. So why did it take this long to do the maths?<\/p>\n
Data centres are consuming six per cent of all UK electricity, while government emissions forecasts have been revised upward by a factor of one hundred. London\u2019s 271 data centres are guzzling 69 per cent more power than the capital\u2019s 3.49m homes combined. Welcome to the week the bill finally arrived.<\/p>\n
The International Data Center Association confirmed this week that electricity consumed by data centres has risen 15 per cent worldwide in just two years, as annual global investment in the sector approaches $1 trillion.<\/p>\n
In the UK and US, consumption has now hit six per cent of national electricity \u2013 well above the global average of two per cent, and most crucially, well above the threshold the IDCA identifies as the point at which \u201csignificant community and political pushback starts to occur.\u201d We are, in other words, there.<\/p>\n
The UK\u2019s rewritten emissions forecast<\/p>\n
Three weeks ago, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) revised its forecast for greenhouse gas emissions from AI data centres. Not by 10 per cent, not by double, but by approximately 100 times.<\/p>\n
Last year, annual emissions were projected at 0.025m tonnes of CO2, and the new figure now sits at least 34m tonnes over the decade to 2035.<\/p>\n
DSIT attributed the change to \u201croutine review\u201d, but one is tempted to suggest that discovering a 100-fold error in your own projections is rather less routine than the phrase implies.<\/p>\n
Carbon Brief had been warning for a month that the original figures were fanciful, with its analysis recently exposing that even if gas-fired electricity accounted for just five per cent of data centre supply, emissions would still be more than ten times higher than the government\u2019s top estimate.<\/p>\n
If expansion reaches the full 20GW of projects that energy regulator Ofgem says have achieved financial commitment, the figure could hit 70 million tonnes, which is roughly Sweden\u2019s entire annual emissions, and nearly 500 times the government\u2019s upper-end projection.<\/p>\n
Tim Squirrell, head of strategy at Foxglove called the original estimates \u201cnonsense magic beans thinking that you can have massive data centre growth without a corresponding increase in new polluting carbon emissions\u201d.<\/p>\n
Old technology in charge of running AI<\/p>\n
There is, buried in the numbers, an efficiency problem that is more tractable than the political failures.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\tRead more<\/p>\n
\t\t\tUK carbon markets stand to get an AI boost<\/a><\/p>\n Patrick Smith, field chief tech officer at Everpure, pointed out that around 80 per cent of all data is stored on hard disk drives 0 technology that is roughly 70 years old and emphatically not designed for modern AI workloads.<\/p>\n Transitioning UK data centres to flash storage could save an estimated four to five terawatt hours annually and \u00a314\u201317m per year in energy costs.<\/p>\n Karim Abou Zahab at HPE added that AI accounted for just 15 per cent of data centre energy use in 2024. The other 85 per cent came from general compute and legacy systems, including what the IDCA delicately calls \u201czombie services\u201d, like running apps nobody uses that were simply never switched off.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, research published this week by Tokamak Energy found that replacing copper infrastructure with high-temperature superconductors could cut data centre power losses by up to 90 per cent, and reduce copper use by 98 per cent.<\/p>\n What comes next?<\/p>\n An unchecked AI boom means higher energy bills, more stress on water supplies and a new lifeline for fossil fuels.<\/p>\n Global Action Plan found that 84 per cent of proposed UK data centres sit in areas the Environment Agency classifies as water stressed.<\/p>\n