Brits should be 'worried' about the environmental impact of increasingly large data centres being built in the UK, AI experts have said, following the approval of a mega AI-data centre in the US that will be the size of 15,840 Tesco Extras.
What is the Stratos Project?
Utah has recently approved a data centre, the Stratos Project, that will be three times the size of Manhattan and consume twice the electricity currently used by the entire state. The data centre will span 40,000 acres, or 1,742,400,000 sq ft. That is the equivalent to 15,840 Tesco Extras, using the example of the 110,000 sq ft Yardley, Birmingham, Tesco Extra store.
Utah State University physics professor, Dr Rob Davies, says the data centre, in Utah's Hansel Valley, will dump the heat equivalent to 23 atomic bombs into the environment each day.
Concerns for UK's AI Growth Zones
Though the UK is unlikely to replicate the scale of the single Hansel Valley data centre, experts warn Brits should be worried about the 'cumulative' environmental impact of AI data centres in the UK, specifically on water systems. They warned people in the UK's major AI Growth Zones (AIGZs), such as Slough, should be especially concerned, as they have the potential to become 'AI Drought Zones' over time.
Speaking to Newspage, Mitali Deypurkaystha, AI Strategist & Author at Newcastle upon Tyne-based Impact Icon AI, said AI's thirst for energy is only going to increase but that it will come at a severe environmental cost.
She said: 'What makes projects like Utah's so unsettling is that AI feels invisible to most people. In reality, it's becoming a form of hidden heavy industry with enormous demands on land, power and water.'
'As an AI strategist, I'm not arguing against AI itself, but against the increasingly frivolous use of it: the assumption that every prompt is somehow consequence-free.'
'The real risk for the UK is not one giant Manhattan-sized site appearing overnight, but quietly building a nationwide infrastructure footprint that we don't notice until the environmental costs become impossible to ignore.'
