The UK is a standout case, but the data – compiled by Censuswide, which canvassed senior AI decision makers in 700 organizations – spans the US and Europe too. The study reveals how the cost and availability of power is reshaping where AI infrastructure gets built, and where AI applications will ultimately live.<\/p>\n
Billions spent racing to acquire GPUs and cloud capacity are running into a hard constraint: in many places, the facilities to host them can’t be built fast enough, held back by planning delays and slow grid connections.<\/p>\n
In Santa Clara, California – home of Nvidia – nearly 100 MW of newly constructed datacenter capacity is sitting empty, it claims, awaiting power connections that may not come for years.<\/p>\n
Energy costs are a particular concern in Britain, which has some of the highest prices in the developed world<\/a>. And for AI infrastructure specifically, the impact is stark: a third of UK organizations say energy costs are limiting their ability to scale.<\/p>\n Among AI-first companies, nearly a third (32 percent) indicate they are considering moving workloads overseas due to power costs – a direct threat to the UK government’s ambitions<\/a> to make Britain a global AI leader and use the technology to drive economic recovery.<\/p>\n Yet around 30 percent are prioritizing sovereign or regionally controlled compute, even if it comes at a higher cost, showing that organizations do want to build in the UK but need the infrastructure to be there, CUDO claims.<\/p>\n To try to counter the UK’s crippling energy costs, the government says it is taking action to break the influence of gas on electricity prices. Because gas-fired power stations are called upon last to balance the grid, such as when wind or solar output is low, they determine the final price of electricity.<\/p>\n This week, the government detailed new measures including long term fixed contracts, and proposed raising the Electricity Generator Levy \u2013 or windfall tax – to ensure a larger proportion of the extraordinary revenues generated when the gas price spikes is available to government to support businesses and households.<\/p>\n These measures and others are intended to incentivize generators to move on to fixed contracts not linked to volatile gas, the government claims.<\/p>\n The US is rated as the most attractive location for new AI cluster provisioning, with three-quarters of respondents viewing it positively, followed by India. Eastern Europe also scores highly, with 58 percent seeing it as a positive location for AI deployment, above Western Europe on 45 percent, and the Nordics (44 percent). China also ranks highly with 55 percent of respondents thinking it a good location for AI projects.<\/p>\n Xiantao datacenter in Chongqing, China \u2013 Pic credit: QinJin\/ Shutterstock<\/p>\n “AI sovereignty is being hotly discussed as a priority for UK organizations, but it only works if the infrastructure exists to support it,” claimed CUDO Compute CEO Matt Hawkins. “What we are seeing is a growing tension between where businesses want to run AI and where they actually can.”<\/p>\n The problem isn’t unique to the UK. Across the US and Europe, the same bottleneck recurs: land, power, cooling, compute, and permits rarely align in the same place at the same time. Even where governments are trying to accelerate delivery – the UK has streamlined planning and other incentives<\/a> – physical infrastructure keeps falling behind demand.<\/p>\n Infrastructure – power, networking and other energy related inputs, rather than GPU pricing – now drives most of the cost in AI deployment. This is reshaping where AI gets built: site selection is increasingly less about proximity to end users and more about proximity to available power, as The Register reported this week<\/a>. Regions with spare grid capacity and available land are winning investment over established datacenter hubs.<\/p>\n Cudo says nearly one in five survey respondents have already scaled back AI workloads due to energy costs, and more than a fifth claim energy bills account for more than a third of their AI infrastructure budgets.<\/p>\n A third of respondents are actively evaluating alternative regions for AI deployment due to infrastructure considerations, and roughly a quarter claimed they would relocate entirely to secure renewable power.<\/p>\n Organizations need to get all their ducks in a row when planning AI deployments and the infrastructure needed to support them, CUDO says – treating zoning, power procurement, and cooling engineering as core competencies rather than downstream logistics handled as an afterthought. \u00ae<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One in five UK firms have already moved AI workloads abroad due to high energy costs, in findings…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":544700,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-544699","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544699","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=544699"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544699\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/544700"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=544699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=544699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=544699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Xiantao](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/shutterstock_1562276128.jpg\" "\\"Xiantao")
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