AI meets concrete: what the US–UK tech pact means for UK data centres

• by Anthony Orjally
• Advent IM Blog

The diplomatic choreography of the recent presidential visit to the UK landed more than photo-ops. The Tech Prosperity Deal signals accelerated AI build-outs in the UK—cloud capacity, GPU clusters, and new DC footprints. Nvidia’s ~120k-GPU pledge alone will materially influence power and cooling plans; Microsoft and others are lining up parallel infrastructure spend. Expect planning debates (sustainability, water use), grid-connection queues, and more scrutiny of security at physically modest but computationally enormous AI sites.

The AI-risk twist for DC operators and tenants

• Model/data governance: treat training data, feature stores and model artefacts as sensitive assets. Align with ISO/IEC 42001 for management-system-grade assurance.
• Supply-chain concentration: the same small club of providers now sits beneath healthcare, finance and public-sector AI workloads—raise the bar on change control, insider risk and geo-redundancy.
• Safety-meets-security: model abuse and prompt injection are “application-layer,” but infra teams still own telemetry, isolation and secrets hygiene.
• People & plant: energy and thermal envelopes widen; resilience measures for UPS/GEN-sets and switchgear security must keep pace with rack-level densities.

Action list: AI policy and risk register; CAPSS-aware hardening of physical security systems; converged red teaming including model/devops pipelines; and supplier audits tuned to identity, data-movement tools and AI operations.

Written by Ellie Hurst, Commercial Director.