Foxglove teams up with FT to debunk the Government’s dodgy AI Growth Zone job creation claims
A good newspaper headline tells you everything you need to know in a handful of words. This one from the Financial Times does exactly that:
Couldn’t have put it any better ourselves.
We worked with the FT’s Alphaville strand for this analysis debunking the shoddy working behind the UK Government’s dodgy job creation claims for new hyperscale data centres or so-called AI Growth Zones (AIGZ).
You can read the whole piece here: https://www.ft.com/content/1a48f0db-b667-4746-83eb-0c4c04e2584f.
Also, the art has Millhouse as the lonely nightwatchman patrolling Bart’s vast data centre hall. We wish we could claim credit for that. Chef’s kiss.
Two key points:
- The Government made a lot of noise last year about an AIGZ in Northumberland, particularly the Cambois data centre being built there by QTS, and claimed it would create 4,000 jobs. Chair of the Science and Tech select committee Chi Onwurah MP asked for the source of the figure, and Government said it came from Northumberland County Council. We asked the council, via a Freedom of Information (FOI) request, what their source was. Their answer? QTS – the very company trying to convince the council to let them build the new data centre complex at Cambois. So via a couple of pointed questions, we see that the Government’s claim of 4,000 new jobs was in effect just laundering the sales pitch of a company with a financial interest in appearing to create thousands of new jobs. Oh dear.
- Next up, the Government put out a press release saying that another AIGZ, this time in South Wales, would create 5,000 new jobs. We FOI-d the source of that one too. The answer? The Government had made the claim by “conservatively scaling projected jobs” by using evidence from… Cambois again! So ministers pulled off the same trick, laundering the figures of the QTS data centre developer, only this time for a completely different data centre complex, hundreds of miles away from Northumberland. As Barry Chuckle might say: oh dear, oh dear.
Much more in the full FT piece: https://www.ft.com/content/1a48f0db-b667-4746-83eb-0c4c04e2584f.
One final point: Foxglove is in principle, neither anti-AI, nor anti-data centre. But if we’re going to have a full and honest conversation about whether or not massive new hyperscale data centres should be builtin the UK, then these kind of silly, misleading arguments, based on sources with clear financial interests in having new data centres built, do no-one any favours – least of all the Government ministers pushing this nonsense while attempting to maintain their credibility.
For journalists and researchers interested in the full FOIs this story is based on, you can find them here: