New AI data centre is the same size as 15,840 Tesco Extras – are enormous sites coming to the UK?

Utah’s Stratos Project is being framed as an environmental story. The bigger issue is governance. A 40,000-acre site approved through a military zoning route shows how planning frameworks designed for industrial estates are being stretched to accommodate infrastructure that now behaves more like a utility. The UK is moving in the same direction. AI Growth Zones are being positioned as economic policy, but decisions around grid capacity, water demand, heat rejection, and land use are still assessed through fragmented processes across different bodies. The real risk is not one oversized site. It is cumulative concentration. The UK could approve clusters of hyperscale AI infrastructure before any single authority has fully assessed the combined impact on energy resilience, water systems, and regional capacity.

Britain’s data centres are already consuming around 6% of the country’s electricity supply, according to IDCA research, roughly equivalent to powering the homes of everyone in Greater London. And AI’s appetite for energy is only accelerating. What makes projects like Utah’s so unsettling is that AI feels invisible to most people. In reality, it's becoming a form of hidden heavy industry with enormous demands on land, power and water. We made the same mistake with “the cloud”, treating limitless digital storage as a weightless convenience before realising that those forgotten files still consume real-world resources. As an AI strategist, I’m not arguing against AI itself, but against the increasingly frivolous use of it: the assumption that every prompt is somehow consequence-free. The real risk for the UK is not one giant Manhattan-sized site appearing overnight, but quietly building a nationwide infrastructure footprint that we don't notice until the costs become impossible to ignore.