UK must accelerate data center construction for AI sovereignty, minister says

The UK needs to build data centers at a dramatically faster pace if it wants to avoid becoming a tenant in someone else’s AI future. That was the core message from Kanishka Narayan, the country’s AI minister, speaking at the Labour Party conference in Liverpool. Narayan, who was appointed on July 20, 2026 as the first Minister for Artificial Intelligence with a seat at the cabinet table, used the September 29 address to call for a “sovereign level of compute.” The capacity gap is massive The UK’s current live data center capacity sits at roughly 2 to 2.6 GW. The US, by comparison, commands more than 50 GW. To close that gap, the government has laid out a plan to triple domestic data center capacity by 2030. The pipeline already includes more than 14 GW of planned capacity spread across 173 projects, with a heavy tilt toward northern England and Scotland. Narayan framed the buildout as a matter of national values, not just national interest. If the servers running your AI systems sit in another country, governed by another country’s rules, your sovereignty over those systems is theoretical at best. Where the money is going The government has established a £500 million Sovereign AI F...