Says UK would lose AI ‘sovereignty’ to US without new facilities
George Osborne, the former UK chancellor who now leads OpenAI’s relationships with governments, used a Sunday festival appearance in Somerset to dismiss protests against UK AI data centers as “nimbys” and to argue that Britain risks losing technological sovereignty to the United States if the facilities cannot be built.
Speaking at the Big Brue festival on Sunday, Osborne drew on his experience as chancellor of the exchequer under David Cameron to compare data center opposition to past battles over roads, railways, and airport runways. “You try and build a datacentre in Britain … I spent my life when I was politician trying to get people to agree to have new roads and railway lines and airport runways and communities go up in arms – it’s really hard to build a datacentre,” he said.
Osborne’s current role at OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, is to represent the company to governments around the world and to support the building of data centers and other infrastructure.
On sovereignty, Osborne said the UK faced a choice about where new facilities are located. “You can either choose to have these datacentres in Ohio and Georgia and Michigan, which is where they’re all being built … we don’t allow these things to be built. They’re going to be built elsewhere, and you know that’s a loss of some sovereign control over the physical location where these things are,” he said. He added that “there’s an enormous building boom going on in the United States of datacentres, even as the political opposition undoubtedly is growing.”
Protests have appeared across the UK in recent months. Demonstrators have gathered in central London, in rural Devon, and outside the Scottish parliament at Holyrood. Protesters have raised concerns about the facilities’ visual impact, questioned whether they will bring local employment, and pointed to the water and energy they consume. Some have objected that data centers occupy land and attract investment that could otherwise go to affordable housing.
The UK government has classified AI data centers as critical national infrastructure to accelerate construction. The Green party in England has separately called for a moratorium on building them.
Osborne rejected the protesters’ framing. “I think a lot of the to opposition datacentres is very much like ‘not in my back yard,’” he said.
Verity Harding, who leads the AI and geopolitics project at the University of Cambridge’s Bennett Institute for Public Policy, offered a different reading. “The reason everyone hates datacentres has nothing to do with datacentres. It’s the only tangible thing to protest against … [people] just don’t like what’s happening and they don’t feel that anybody’s in control or thinking about the impact of it,” Harding said.
Harding also pointed to contradictions in how AI executives communicate with the public. “It’s exactly because the tech industry execs are talking in this ridiculous way … You know, you cannot go out on the one hand and say this might kill everybody one week, and then the next week go and appear at a big sales conference saying that you should integrate it into your business,” she said.
Bosses of OpenAI and Anthropic, two of the largest AI companies in the world, are meeting world leaders at the UN general assembly in New York City this week as the world grapples with the prospect of dangerous, superintelligent AI and how and whether it should be regulated.
Osborne characterized that corporate-governmental engagement as benign. “The fact that corporate leaders are sitting down with the presidents and prime ministers of the world in the UN security council, I would say actually shouldn’t be alarming. It’s actually reassuring that people are beginning to try and use the kind of institutions of the world to think about how we regulate this new technology,” he said.