I'm the Director of the SMF. We're transparent about sponsors & I politely reject the implication that we lack depth. In the last year, we've published: how to power data centres; AI & copyright; public sector use; problems with 5g rollout; restrictive software licensing. Happy to meet to discuss.

From Labour's perspective, if they think they are very likely to lose the seat, then it might be better to fix an earlier date. Mid-April. Blame low turnout. Get the news out of the way so that the locals are unequivocally about Tory losses. If they think they can win, stick with May 1st.

You can read the full report here. This is part of
@smfthinktank.bsky.social
AI programme, which is kindly supported by OpenAI, Anthropic and Amazon/AWS

www.smf.co.uk/publications...

Finally, locational pricing is an idea whose time has come. The CEO of Ofgem said as much on Friday. Of course not every datacentre will move north but we can make it easier & more desirable for energy-hungry businesses to locate where the energy abundance is.

On energy, the government should be championing SMRs (prefab mini nuclear plants). Not just one or two but building fleets, so that the costs come down. Thanks to companies like Rolls SMR, this is an area where the UK can lead.

On planning, the government have made the right start in their AI strategy but we can go faster & further. Simplify the process & let councils keep the business rates to incentivise them to be part of the solution.

The
@SMFthinktank
makes 3 key recommendations:
1) Incentivise datacentres through datacentre zoning & bypassing planning
2) In the long run - build fleets of SMRs (mini nuclear plants)
3) Locational pricing - allow the price of wholesale price of energy to come down in Scotland

Failure to build enough domestic data centre capacity runs the risk of UK businesses & consumers being unable to access the compute they need, leading to higher costs of digital services in the UK & an exodus of AI companies & talent. So what can we do to solve this?

Alarm bells should be ringing. While the UK leads Europe on datacentres, this is not guaranteed indefinitely. Our key competitors - France & Germany - are catching up. Frankfurt & Paris are accelerating their compute growth faster than London.

The absurdity of the UK's outdated energy market is that we have excess supply in Scotland &the North & excess demand in the South East but can't connect one to the other. Ridiculously, we're routinely switching off wind turbines in Scotland that would power London for a day.

The UK’s cripplingly high energy costs are stunting the growth of the UK’s data centre sector. Our energy market risks pricing the UK out of the AI race.

More here:

www.smf.co.uk/commentary_p...

What this amounts to is a doubling down on supply side reform - or at least Labour's version of supply side reform.