Does the UK really need Gigawatt data centres? | Civo Navigate London 2026

Civo

Oct 23, 2026

Everyone's racing to build gigawatt AI factories by 2035. What if the faster route is already plugged in?

Swarms of agents need far more compute than a chat prompt ever did, and the scaling laws say demand isn't slowing. But in the UK, anything over 15MW can mean waiting until 2032 or later for a grid connection.

So the panel makes a different case: smaller sites on existing power and fibre, linked into one national campus, live in less time than a single mega-build.

Chapters

0:00 Intro

0:05 From chat prompts to swarms of agents

0:51 Are we building enough data centres?

1:14 Scaling laws and the 10x GPU problem

2:28 Small island, expensive power

2:41 Why the UK can't just throw money at it

3:33 The problem with 500,000 sq ft data centres

3:57 Smaller sites, existing power

4:29 Edge inference and the 15MW grid wait

5:05 Pockets of power and one Civo campus

5:58 Power prices, PUE and renewables
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