UK Google Interview: We Need Data Centres And Grid Connections, Fast

New Google data centre under construction in Waltham Cross, August 2024

Sienna Rodgers

@siennamarla

These days ministers are often heard predicting that artificial intelligence (AI) will drive everything from economic growth to public sector reform, improving healthcare and education, and detecting nasties from potholes to cancer.

Fond of referring to Britain as the third-largest AI market in the world, Tech Secretary Peter Kyle has presented the AI Opportunities Action Plan and says he is “unapologetic” in his ambition. Yet the UK is at serious risk of being left behind, as its investments in tech infrastructure pale in comparison to those of the US and China.

Google UK’s public policy lead Tom Morrison-Bell, like Kyle, is optimistic about the UK’s prospects of being a world leader in AI.

“When it comes to this AI opportunity, the UK is well-placed to succeed. If you think of Google, we opened our first office here about 20 years ago. We have over 7,000 employees here. We’ve got a new office in King’s Cross that will be opening soon. [AI research lab] DeepMind is headquartered in London. We have a long history and commitment of the UK being valuable.”

But he is also clear that, while the UK government has set out bold plans, those will need to be underpinned by infrastructure.

“The government recognises that if the UK is going to succeed, that’s going to be one of the key ingredients. If you think of data centres in the sense of AI factories, what are the conditions that you need to get there?” he asks.

“If you strip it all back, it’s about how quickly you can get connection to the grid”

So, what kind of infrastructure is needed for Google UK’s AI plans? “Ultimately, it’s data centres. We are investing in our $1bn data centre in Waltham Cross, just outside London, which will help power the demand for AI innovation and cloud services in the UK. Those are going to be the real underpinners to that, to make this a reality,” says Morrison-Bell. He confirms that the Waltham Cross data centre is still on track to be completed in 2025.

The UK government only recognised data centres as “core infrastructure” last year, under Rishi Sunak, and it was widely felt the move was long overdue. If Google has been frustrated with the UK’s slow pace in acknowledging the importance of data centres, Morrison-Bell refuses to say so, only adding that ministers are now “sending a good signal”.

Asked about whether planning permission and the speed of those processes are the biggest hindrance to new UK tech infrastructure, however, he does make a demand for ministers to consider.

“There is a proposal in the Planning Bill to give priority to nationally significant infrastructure projects. Given that data centres have been classified as critical national infrastructure, it would be good to see them thought of in that bucket so that they can be accelerated.”

Slow grid connections – already well-known to be a major obstacle to renewable energy projects – are also a critical area for tech companies in the UK.

“If you strip it all back, it’s about how quickly you can get connection to the grid. When we are looking at areas, asking the grid for when we might get a connection for a potential site, for any infrastructure developer, you will often get told, ‘You’re going to have to wait 10 years before you can get a connection’.

“That is slow for any infrastructure project. And if we were talking about the scale and the pace and the opportunity that’s available for AI, that’s a long time to be waiting,” Morrison-Bell explains.

“One of the challenges is that there’s basically a queue for your connection, and when you ask for it, it’s first come, first served. So, you ask for your connection, and you go to the back of the queue... And in the queue, there are lots and lots of projects – because of that system – which had been put into the queue but may or may not be built, but take up energy allocation in the queue.”

Google UK is eager to see the removal of so-called ‘zombie projects’ from the queue, which would speed up requests for projects that are ready to go.

“The Planning Bill has a proposal that would mean that rather than being first come, first served in the queue, it would be the first ready, first connected,” he continues. “So, people wouldn’t put speculative projects into the queue. The idea is where you can show that your project is ready for connection, then you would be prioritised for connection. That’s a really good idea.”

Ed Miliband may be a controversial figure in Westminster, even among sceptical colleagues within both Labour and government. Yet his ambitious – some say unrealistic – plans for clean power by 2030 have a friend in Google.

“The ‘Clean Power 2030’ ambition really aligns with our ambitions in this area around having the most sustainable data centres,” Morrison-Bell says. “It’s a really powerful direction for ensuring that the UK has abundant clean energy.”

Google used to be called “the window to the internet”. Now it is OpenAI’s generative AI chatbot ChatGPT that is talked about in such terms, with anecdotal reports of people switching their homepages accordingly. Even Kyle, the Tech Secretary, uses it to generate policy and comms advice. Is Google worried about being left behind?

“I think our products and AI advances are absolutely incredible,” the public policy lead replies in its defence. He points to “the transformer”, a deep learning architecture invented by Google in a 2017 landmark research paper. It now serves as the foundation for most modern large language models, including ChatGPT (with GPT standing for “generative pre-trained transformer”).

The transformer “underpins all of this technology”, he adds. “We’ve been at the forefront of AI; we’ve been an AI-first company since 2017; AI is embedded in all of our products.

“You see amazing applications of it in day-to-day uses of all of Google’s products, like fuel-efficient routing in Google Maps, saving hundreds of millions of tons of emissions globally – that’s an AI-powered tool. Google is and will continue to be like a pioneer in this field.”

Morrison-Bell is keen, too, to highlight the work of DeepMind, which began as a start-up in the UK and was bought by Google in 2014. Last year British co-founder Sir Demis Hassabis and American director John M Jumper were awarded a Nobel Prize in chemistry for its AI programme AlphaFold.

“AlphaFold predicts the structure of proteins, which is a longstanding challenge in biology and chemistry, and how proteins are folded has a huge impact on how drugs are developed, how cells work. It’s at the core of a lot of biology,” he explains.

“There are roughly 250m known proteins. It would typically take one PhD student the entire length of their PhD to do one protein and how it folds. That’s now a publicly available resource, for free, which saves an estimated one billion PhD hours.”

He also points to advances in health tech that have been similarly praised by Keir Starmer: “Our colleagues at Google Health are working with three NHS Trusts to test AI mammography tools, so they should help act as a second reader to make sure that women get faster results and earlier treatment for any breast cancer screening.”

“Those kinds of advances are beginning to happen. The infrastructure that powers that is going to be absolutely critical to the UK being a leader,” he adds, pointing to research undertaken with Public First that put the opportunity of AI-powered innovation at around £400bn by 2030 “if it’s done right” in the UK.

But while politicians celebrate the £225m Bristol University supercomputer, for example, some point out that £1.3bn of tech and AI funding promised by the previous government has been shelved. Meanwhile, global competitors are investing billions in high-performance computing. So, is the UK government’s ambition really in the right place?

“I think it definitely is,” says Google UK’s public policy lead. “And we’ve got a long history of investment here, and a big footprint. We stand ready to do our bit in the UK to help make that a reality.”

Even when asked about the Competition and Markets Authority’s open investigations into Google search and ads, which could see new rules placed on the company, Morrison-Bell simply points to the government’s AI action plan as “setting a good agenda”. Kyle has declared that he wants a “respectful” relationship with big tech firms – going by Google UK’s answers to The House, it appears the feeling is mutual. 

Related

Abolishing NHS England Became "Inevitable" – But What Happens Next?

By Zoe Crowther

13 Mar

PoliticsHome Newsletters

PoliticsHome provides the most comprehensive coverage of UK politics anywhere on the web, offering high quality original reporting and analysis: Subscribe