Invest in Social Infrastructure Alongside Physical Infrastructure
Invest in Social Infrastructure Alongside Physical Infrastructure UKAI welcomes yesterday’s announcement of a further £6.3 billion investment to build data centres across the UK from ServiceNow, CyrusOne, CloudHQ,CoreWeave. This follows the news back in April of Blackstone’s investment of £10 billion to build one of Europe’s largest data centres in Blyth and Amazon’s announcement in September that they will be investing £8 billion. These investments are testament to the hard work of successive governments in setting out the business case for the UK as a global leader in technological innovation, now and into the future. The new Labour government has underlined its commitment to supporting the technology ecosystem with a number of announcements, not least the imminent AI opportunities action plan. Investors are looking for certainty and the government’s announcement in August that they would speed up planning decisions to enable new infrastructure to be built has provided further reassurance: Confirmation of the Amazon investment came within weeks. Whilst these investments provide long term opportunities for businesses, UKAI believes that there is an even more important type of infrastructure, the social infrastructure. Of course there are a number of important phases to plan the development of these data centres and there are already a number of concerns around access to physical infrastructure (water, electricity, fibre) but it is time to start planning how we will connect these data centres to the local communities through skills, knowledge, training and jobs. We’re looking forward to seeing national and local government take the lead in bringing together universities, colleges, schools and communities in ‘clusters’ around these data centres. There is a massive opportunity to diffuse the skills, knowledge and capital from these new investments into the local communities. But, like the physical infrastructure, building the social infrastructure will take time and focus to plan and deliver. It’s time to start.