In July 2026, Angela Rayner and Matthew Pennycook overruled local objections to approve a new data centre at the Truman Brewery site near Brick Lane. This was despite MHCLG’s move to, soon after Labour’s win in the 2024 general election, designate data centres as critical national infrastructure. Tower Hamlets Council, a body with a notoriously grubby history of sectarianism and electoral corruption, suddenly cast itself as the austere guardian of local democracy.
If one zooms out from this parochial drama, the dispute exposes the massive physical bottleneck in our digital future. When a local planning committee looks at a server farm in East London, they see a boxy industrial shed. In his 2016 book The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, Benjamin Bratton would argue that this same building is actually a physical node in a planetary megastructure.
In The Stack, Bratton argues that the twentieth-century Westphalian order — where sovereignty was anchored strictly to geographic borders and national parliaments — is being superseded by “the Stack.” Planetary computation has evolved into a competing architecture of global governance. This system is mapped across six vertical layers, anchored at the bottom by the “Earth” layer of minerals and energy grids, which directly underpins the subsea cables and server farms of the “Cloud.” This foundation dictates every layer built on top of it: “City,” “Address,” “Interface,” and the human “User.” If the Stack is the new architecture of global power, a nation cannot assert real sovereignty merely through legislation; it must own physical territory inside the Stack itself. That is why data centres are the core baseline of national agency.
Unlike our Victorian forefathers, twenty-first-century Britain excels at finding reasons to say no. We generate profound national scarcity through thousands of individually defensible local vetoes over housing, reservoirs, nuclear plants and server farms. Scarcity is never neutral: it drives up prices, protects incumbents and restricts access. If progressives want a theory of abundance, they must recover the Britain’s capacity to build.
Strip away Silicon Valley’s sci-fi eschatology. Artificial intelligence is simply on track to become an ordinary, general-purpose input for medicine, programming and research.
The risks of planning for this are highly asymmetric. If AI plateaus, Britain is left with clean electricity and modern digital infrastructure. But if the technology becomes foundational and we have deliberately underbuilt, our dependence on foreign computing power becomes permanent.
Compute scarcity is the ultimate incumbent-protection policy. When server space is limited, massive American hyperscalers can afford land and hardware at any cost, leaving universities, independent researchers and open-source developers locked out. Scarcity privatises intelligence; abundance creates the baseline where democratic access stands a chance.
Resistance is already hardening. Green Party politicians have demanded a halt to new data centres over water consumption worries. Yet those anxieties basic perspective. Data centres consume far less water than paper mills or commercial farms. A single hamburger uses up more water than millions of AI queries. More importantly, computing’s water footprint is an engineering choice, not a law of physics. Modern facilities use closed-loop systems that continually recycle the same supply, or employ direct-to-chip liquid cooling. The state could mandate these designs instead of imposing blanket bans. Indeed, between 2018 and 2020, Microsoft’s Project Natick operated a sealed data centre off the Orkney coast. It ran on local renewable energy and used the frigid sea for cooling, proving eight times more reliable than terrestrial equivalents.
Orkney makes Bratton’s model literal. Britain’s cold seas and offshore wind potential are natural assets we must build around.
The British government’s own 2026 Compute Roadmap projects a requirement of six gigawatts of AI-capable capacity by 2030 — tripling our current baseline. Yet without an aggressive commitment to building sovereign capability, we risk remaining mere Users staring at Interfaces while the Cloud layer remains solidly American. Westphalian statehood will not protect us if the infrastructure through which British society thinks is perpetually rented from abroad.
Because any computational economy is fundamentally an energy economy, compute abundance demands cheap, abundant power. Exorbitant British electricity prices ruin the economics of sovereign infrastructure. We need a massive expansion in offshore wind, nuclear generation and grid capacity. Environmentalism cannot survive purely as a demand to consume less; it must advocate for generating vastly more clean energy.
This demands a shift in how we govern scale. Local opposition to technical rationality is not inherently progressive. Complex realities require institutions that can intervene at scale. Local consultation is legitimate, but proximity to a site should not grant an absolute veto over infrastructure serving a national need.
In June 1949, Alan Turing warned from his Manchester laboratory that primitive computers were “only a foretaste of what is to come and only the shadow of what is going to be.” Britain helped invent this future. Yet we risk venerating the inventor while renting his legacy. The old order of statecraft has yielded to the Stack. It is being built right now, and Britain must build its own footprint within it or accept permanent subordination.