We did not grow much here or in many developed countries (except for the United States), and what we didn’t see tended to arrive in a form that most people did not immediately benefit.
Data centers and AI usually may not mean much of growth. Goldman Sachs released a fascinating paper a few months ago. City morning Summary: “Goldman Sachs has been published paper The productivity benefits and yields of AI are much limited than expected, while the power demand is so large that utility companies will have to spend almost 40 % more in the next three years to meet demand. ”
In essence, we can invest a lot of money and invest very important resources for things that do not do much for a wider economy. Robert Solow said in 1987: “How can I see the IT revolution except for productivity statistics?”
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However, except for the big picture, the details of the data center look bad. These things are harshly limited to local economy.
The planned data center of TEESSIDE will be operated by Blackstone and the British Prime Minister Rachel Reeves will be announced as a big Fangfar. In the case of that $ 1 billion, it is expected to create 4,000 jobs locally. In other words, it is expected to cost about $ 2.5 million for all produced tasks.
This is not a public fund, but of course, the world’s largest data center itself will use a huge amount of public resources. .
This means more grid connections to more pressure on both systems. More pressure on both -it is for investing in investing that can create a small number of tasks compared to all the amounts.
Data centers are larger capital than labor -intensive investments. In other words, in order to work, it relies much more on server banks full of overheated silicone chips than to run there.
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And the profits that have gained astronomical profits from major monopoly operators (until recently) generally flow not only outside the region but also outside the country.
Digital service taxes introduced by the last government are mostly a part of these interests to return to public wallets to attempt to attempt and drive some of the money that is being flooded with great US technology.
But keep an eye on what happens in the upcoming negotiations with the Trump administration for trade transactions. My guessing will assume that Trump will demand demolition in return for US-UK trade transactions.
Neither of these means that we should not invest in all kinds of data centers and computing skills.
Lee Mi -bi
The National Engineering Policy Center has an excellent suggestion of how to make data centers more environmentally sustainable from top to bottom. E -waste problems are suffering from electronic waste (UK is produced per person per person than other countries except Norway), recycling options, data centers, etc.
But we need a much more sophisticated conversation on these purposes. The arrival of DeepSeek is to force us all. If you can build a sophisticated large language model without using a large infrastructure and resources, Big Tech claims a variety of possibilities.
We can think about democratizing and spreading technology by using smaller and simpler models for the kind of work that AI knows well -things like drug discovery or localized environmental modeling.
It is the opposite of this that we are in the government, the industry, and the so -called YIMBY movement.
This author
James Meadway is an economist and a former political advisor. This article is based on a copy of the PODCAST episode of Meadway. Macrodos.
