Question to the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade, what estimate he has made of the required AI compute capacity required by the nation for the next (a) one year, (b) three years and (c) five years; and how these forecasts are calculated.

Given the pace of technological change and uncertainty around future AI adoption, the Government’s approach is to plan for a range of AI compute demand and maintain the flexibility to scale capacity as requirements evolve, rather than set fixed estimates at one-, three- and five-year intervals.

The UK Compute Roadmap forecasts that the UK will need at least 6 GW of AI-capable data-centre capacity by 2030, around three times the data-centre capacity available in the UK when the Roadmap was published. The Roadmap notes that demand could significantly exceed this baseline if AI capabilities and adoption accelerate. It also identifies particularly rapid growth at the frontier of AI, where demand for compute is expected to increase by 10,000 times by the end of the decade, while inference is expected to account for the majority of overall AI compute demand.

The Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade continues to update and refine the range of demand estimates.