{"id":779028,"date":"2026-09-22T16:06:13","date_gmt":"2026-09-22T16:06:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/779028\/"},"modified":"2026-09-22T16:06:13","modified_gmt":"2026-09-22T16:06:13","slug":"openais-george-osborne-says-datacentre-nimbys-holding-back-britain-george-osborne","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/779028\/","title":{"rendered":"OpenAI\u2019s George Osborne says datacentre nimbys holding back Britain | George Osborne"},"content":{"rendered":"

Datacentre nimbys are holding Britain back, George Osborne<\/a> has said in reaction to nationwide protests about the giant water- and energy-guzzling structures.<\/p>\n

The former Tory chancellor is now the head of AI for countries at OpenAI<\/a>, the developer of ChatGPT. His job is to represent the company to governments around the world and he also has a role in enabling the building of datacentres and other infrastructure.<\/p>\n

Speaking at the Big Brue festival in Somerset on Sunday, Osborne said: \u201cYou try and build a datacentre in Britain \u2026 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 \u2013 it\u2019s really hard to build a datacentre.\u201d<\/p>\n

George Osborne, who was Britain\u2019s chancellor in David Cameron\u2019s cabinet, now leads OpenAI\u2019s relationship-building with governments around the world. Photograph: Christinne Muschi\/The Canadian Press\/AP<\/p>\n

He said the UK would lose its \u201csovereignty\u201d over tech to the US if it failed to allow datacentres to be built.<\/p>\n

He explained: \u201cYou can either choose to have these datacentres in Ohio and Georgia and Michigan, which is where they\u2019re all being built \u2026 we don\u2019t allow these things to be built. They\u2019re going to be built elsewhere, and you know that\u2019s a loss of some sovereign control over the physical location where these things are.\u201d<\/p>\n

There have been protests about datacentres across the UK, including in central London<\/a>, Devon<\/a> and outside Holyrood in Edinburgh<\/a>. People have said they are a blight on the landscape, questioned whether they will bring jobs to the local area, and argued they will take investment and space that could be used for affordable housing. There are also concerns about the vast water and energy use.<\/p>\n

The government has classified AI datacentres as critical national infrastructure to get them built more quickly. But the Green party in England has called for a moratorium<\/a> on building them.<\/p>\n

Osborne dismissed the concerns over datacentres as nimbyism. He said: \u201cI think a lot of the to opposition datacentres is very much like \u2018not in my back yard\u2019. There\u2019s an enormous building boom going on in the United States of datacentres, even as the political opposition undoubtedly is growing.\u201d<\/p>\n

The protest outside Holyrood. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

Verity Harding, the head of the AI and geopolitics project at Cambridge University\u2019s Bennett School for Public Policy, said people had wider concerns over these centres.<\/p>\n

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She said: \u201cThe reason everyone hates datacentres has nothing to do with datacentres. It\u2019s the only tangible thing to protest against \u2026 [people] just don\u2019t like what\u2019s happening and they don\u2019t feel that anybody\u2019s in control or thinking about the impact of it.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s exactly because the tech industry execs are talking in this ridiculous way \u2026 You know, you cannot go out on the one hand and say this [AI] might kill everybody<\/a> one week and then the next week go and appear at a big sales conference saying that you should integrate it into your business.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bosses of OpenAI and Anthropic, two of the largest AI companies, will be meeting world leaders at the UN general assembly in New York City this week amid debate over the prospect of dangerous, superintelligent AI and whether and how it should be regulated.<\/p>\n

Osborne said: \u201cThe 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\u2019t be alarming. It\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Datacentre nimbys are holding Britain back, George Osborne has said in reaction to nationwide protests about the giant…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":779029,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-779028","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\/779028","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=779028"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/779028\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/779029"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=779028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=779028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=779028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}