BRITAIN — The UK Department of Science, Innovation and Technology revised its published projections for greenhouse gas emissions from AI datacentres, raising the figures by more than a factor of 100. The revision came one day after a comment request from a national newspaper.

The department, known as DSIT, originally projected in its UK compute roadmap that the carbon emissions of additional AI computing capacity would be between 0.025 and 0.142 million tonnes of carbon equivalent, representing below 0.05% of Britain's projected emissions. Earlier this year, the annex containing those projections was removed from the government website after Carbon Brief reported concerns about their plausibility.

DSIT updated its numbers to state: "The UK's cumulative 10-year greenhouse gas emissions from AI compute could range from 34 to 123 MtCO₂ – this is around 0.9-3.4% of the UK's projected total emissions over the 10-year period. If successful, the UK's grid decarbonisation plans would help to reduce emissions from datacentres towards the bottom end of this range."

The UK compute roadmap, put forward by DSIT in 2025, sets out a plan to transform the national compute ecosystem by building AI datacentres. The roadmap envisages multiple AI growth zones, each requiring at least 500MW of electricity. DSIT said in the document: "We forecast that the UK will need at least 6GW of AI-capable datacentre capacity by 2030."

The Department of Energy Security and Net Zero, by contrast, forecasts that AI datacentres will consume less than 0.6GW of electricity by 2030. In January, the NGO Foxglove filed an environmental impact assessment request with that department asking how it had incorporated AI datacentres into its projections for Britain's emissions. The department referred researchers to its broader forecasts for the energy use of Britain's commercial services sector and said it did not hold separate projections for datacentre growth. Those broader forecasts project a 528MW increase between 2025 and 2030, equivalent to adding the energy consumption of 1.7 million homes — ten times lower than the 6GW committed to AI datacentres in the UK compute roadmap.

A Department of Energy Security and Net Zero spokesperson said: "Datacentre emissions are factored into our modelling, including for carbon budget 7. The AI Energy Council is exploring opportunities to attract investment and support the development of clean power for datacentres." Carbon budget 7 is to be released this summer.

Cecilia Rikap, a researcher at University College London, said: "There are two ways to interpret this 'misalignment': either DESNZ and DSIT are incompetent, or there's some kind of magical thinking about AI and big tech. Either way, the episode uncovers how these corporations control not only the AI value chain, but also the UK government." Tim Squirrell, head of strategy for Foxglove, said: "The government's cluelessness over the environmental impact of datacentres would be laughable, if it weren't so alarming."