IT Sustainability Suppose Tank: Constructing the spine of the UK’s AI economic system
The UK is coming into a pivotal part within the evolution of its digital economic system as synthetic intelligence (AI) shifts from experimental innovation to mainstream dependency.
Platforms similar to ChatGPT now appeal to a whole bunch of thousands and thousands of weekly lively customers worldwide, whereas Microsoft 365 Copilot has been quickly adopted throughout the enterprise panorama, with almost 70% of Fortune 500 firms integrating it into day by day workflows.
This unprecedented progress in AI utilization is inserting monumental strain on the UK’s digital and power infrastructure, notably the datacentre ecosystem that underpins these companies.
At Digital Catapult, we speed up the sensible software of deep tech innovation in trade and see firsthand how AI should be leveraged to strengthen the power sector and the very infrastructure it makes use of to mobilise financial progress.
Datacentre enlargement, grid constraints and geographic imbalance
The enlargement of UK datacentre capability is unfolding in an more and more chaotic and uncoordinated method. Planning authorities have been inundated with simultaneous purposes, with greater than 60 separate planning purposes for the development of recent datacentres filed in England and Wales final 12 months, creating vital native pressure and signalling an absence of nationwide oversight.
The geography of datacentre deployment is equally imbalanced, with the most important clusters concentrated round London Docklands and Slough, two of Europe’s most mature and interconnected digital hubs.
Total, the sample is one in every of hyper‑focus slightly than strategic distribution, elevating the chance of a deepening digital divide that leaves rural and semi‑rural communities technologically marginalised.
As AI servers grow to be extra energy‑dense, datacentre connection requests – typically sized to mirror anticipated ultimate capability – are inserting rising calls for on electrical energy networks, prompting suppliers to discover various options that will carry environmental trade-offs.
The shortage of standardised carbon accounting for digital workloads, as evidenced in our report final 12 months, means these environmental impacts stay opaque and poorly quantified.
AI might assist handle this problem by optimising datacentre planning and operations, lowering carbon impression by way of smarter infrastructure design and deployment.
This is the reason Digital Catapult’s place-based strategy to innovation helps to democratise entry to compute and connectivity. And by offering technological and innovation consultancy to corporates within the datacentre and power area, we recognise the necessity to strengthen carbon accounting utilizing deep tech innovation.
How the UK can construct a good and sustainable spine
Beneath current laws, Ofgem approves funding ranges for electrical energy networks, whereas customers finally fund a good portion of this by way of family power payments.
Demand‑connection purposes surged from 41 GW in late 2024 to 125 GW by mid‑2025, prompting warnings that customers could also be subsidising hyperscaler‑pushed grid expansions with out receiving proportional advantages.
If the present mannequin persists, households and small companies might face increased payments to underwrite infrastructure primarily serving non-public datacentre developments.
Overlaying all of that is the pressing want for credible carbon accounting, which we’ve investigated at Digital Catapult by way of our AI-led innovation programmes.
We all know that for every AI question, inference operation or coaching cycle carries a measurable carbon price, but the trade lacks constant requirements for reporting digital‑emissions depth.
With out dependable metrics, sustainability claims will stay speculative, and organisations will battle to guage the true environmental impression of their digital methods.
That is the place deep tech innovation is necessary, and the place Digital Catapult’s interventions will strengthen infrastructure planning and mobilise financial progress and AI success.
How Digital Catapult is serving to to drive sustainable AI
Via focused programmes Digital Catapult is serving to trade transfer from aspiration to motion by tackling the shortage of constant, credible requirements for measuring digital-emissions depth that may inform infrastructure planning and operations.
Our interventions convene capabilities between expertise suppliers, infrastructure operators and end-users to develop sensible frameworks that quantify the carbon impression of digital workloads, from AI coaching and inference to datacentre operations and community utilization.
By establishing shared metrics and customary reporting approaches, our work helps allow organisations to make knowledgeable selections about the place, how and at what scale AI programs are deployed, unlocking productiveness beneficial properties whereas making certain infrastructure funding aligns with sustainability aims.
This standardisation effort strengthens the foundations of the UK’s digital and power infrastructure, with clear, comparable emissions information permitting policymakers, regulators and buyers to determine the place grid reinforcement, low-carbon technology and regional capability will ship the best financial return.
As such, Digital Catapult is accelerating the sensible software of AI innovation throughout sectors, making certain that as AI continues to be embedded within the cloth of the economic system, and that the infrastructure that helps it’s resilient, equitable and match for long-term nationwide success.
Constructing on this basis, a subsequent step is to maneuver past optimisation and rethink how digital infrastructure is designed. Whereas carbon accounting is necessary, a real step change could come from shifting away from the hyper-cluster mannequin of extremely concentrated services in the direction of a extra distributed, cooperative community of datacentres which might be geographically dispersed and intelligently orchestrated.
Enabled by AI-driven workload administration, digital twins and superior connectivity, this strategy might route compute in accordance with grid capability, carbon depth and resilience wants, lowering strain on networks whereas integrating extra successfully with native power programs. Digital Catapult can assist firms to discover and validate these fashions by convening capabilities, bringing collectively expertise suppliers, infrastructure operators and end-users to check new technical architectures and enterprise fashions that underpin a extra resilient and sustainable AI economic system.
The UK has a chance to guide in each AI functionality and sustainable digital‑infrastructure planning. Attaining this can require coherent nationwide technique, modernised funding and regulatory frameworks, accelerated grid reinforcement and a clear, equitable price‑sharing mannequin. AI is changing into the working layer of the fashionable economic system and can be utilized to tell infrastructure funding, which will construct the spine of the nation’s AI economic system.
Any readers concerned about studying extra about Digital Catapult’s work on this area can discover out extra right here.
