By Eoin, 17.

For decades, the North East of England has lagged behind the rest of the country. 

Lower life expectancy, lower educational attainment, brain drain of the most talented to the south and abroad, one of the highest rates of child poverty in the UK, and massive underinvestment in public infrastructure.

It’s a story that’s been told many times over and over again, and now the US president arrives in the UK, a brand new North East “AI growth zone” has been announced. 

But what does that mean? Unlike historical advancements, the location of a data centre has minimal impacts on who can use it. The information coming out of it travels at light speed, meaning essentially a data centre could be next door or in Berlin and its utility to you, the end user would be negligibly affected.  

On the other hand, AI data centres can take a lot of resources. Historically data centres took up a lot less resources as they were mainly retaining data and serving it to people using the services.  

But AI data centres don’t work like that. AI data centres have a massive requirement for “compute,” meaning a lot of electricity will be required to complete extremely complicated mathematics.  

This has caused massive noise pollution problems in areas that AI data centres have previously been built, primarily in the American South with communities facing noise pollution, worsened water quality and increased electricity prices from the massive strain on electrical infrastructure AI data centres have. 

The “AI growth zone” has a series of projects being announced by Google and Microsoft during the recent Trump State Visit to the United Kingdom with Blyth and the Cobalt Business Park in Wallsend already being confirmed sites. 

If AI data centres are built here in the North East could result in the region just being used as an easy place to strain, while other parts of the country benefit from the money being spent by Microsoft and Google. 

This story was written by young people as part of the Headliners Young Journalist programme. This project was made possible by the Million Hours Fund.

Image sourced from Unsplash.