Sovereignty Is an Illusion, Said Osborne in June. In September, He's Selling It

The former Conservative chancellor George Osborne has dismissed opposition to Britain’s AI datacentre build-out as nimbyism, warning that if the UK refuses to host the facilities, the computing power will simply be built in American states instead — and that Britain will lose “sovereign control” over where the physical infrastructure of AI sits.

Speaking at the Big Brue festival in Somerset on Sunday, Osborne — who since December 2025 has been OpenAI’s head of AI for countries, the executive charged with representing the ChatGPT maker to governments worldwide — drew on his fourteen years in politics to frame the problem. “You try and build a datacentre in Britain … I spent my life when I was politician trying to get people to agree to have new roads and railway lines and airport runways, and communities go up in arms — it’s really hard to build a datacentre,” he said.

His prescription for local dissent was blunt: “I think a lot of the opposition to datacentres is very much like ‘not in my back yard’. There’s an enormous building boom going on in the United States of datacentres, even as the political opposition undoubtedly is growing.”

The Ohio, Georgia and Michigan ultimatum

The core of Osborne’s argument is not that Britain needs more computing power for its own sake, but that geography is destiny in the AI era. “You can either choose to have these datacentres in Ohio and Georgia and Michigan, which is where they’re all being built … we don’t allow these things to be built. They’re going to be built elsewhere, and you know that’s a loss of some sovereign control over the physical location where these things are.”

The framing is deliberate: a country that wants to be an “AI superpower” — the stated ambition of the current UK government — but which outsources its compute to another continent, keeps the dependence while surrendering the siting. British businesses and public services would still consume the models; the servers, the grid connections, the jobs and the tax base would belong to Ohio, Georgia and Michigan.

It is also a commercial argument wearing a national-interest costume. Osborne’s role at OpenAI includes enabling datacentre construction abroad — he was hired in December 2025 to lead the international arm of Stargate, the company’s global datacentre programme. When he says Britain must build or lose out, he is describing the exact deal his employer is shopping to governments, and the exact leverage his employer holds. That is not a reason to dismiss the argument, but it is a reason to notice who is making it.

The protests he is dismissing

The resistance Osborne waved away as nimbyism has a specific texture. Demonstrations have taken place in central London, in Devon, and outside the Scottish parliament at Holyrood in Edinburgh. The objections are not primarily aesthetic. Campaigners point to:

• Water. Large AI facilities use drinking-quality water for cooling, and a Chatham House analysis found that 84 per cent of proposed British datacentres are sited in areas expected to experience water stress by 2040. Government analysis warns global AI-related water consumption could rise from 1.1 billion cubic metres to 6.6 billion by 2027.
• Energy. Cooling alone can account for up to 40 per cent of a datacentre’s total energy consumption, and AI processors run hotter, denser and longer than conventional servers.
• Land and housing. Opponents argue that grid connections, land and public investment committed to windowless server sheds could instead support affordable housing and local infrastructure — and they note that datacentres create strikingly few permanent jobs once construction ends.
• Accountability. Campaigners have demanded clearer answers on carbon emissions, grid impact and long-term employment, and report that the answers have not been forthcoming.

The government’s counter-context is that datacentres currently account for less than one per cent of non-household water use in England, and that critical-infrastructure status does not automatically grant them priority over households during shortages. Scotland has gone further than protest: MSPs have backed tighter environmental scrutiny for hyperscale datacentres, including a planning pause of up to a year while national guidance is written. The UK government, meanwhile, has classified AI datacentres as critical national infrastructure — the same category as water, energy and emergency services — and proposed AI Growth Zones to accelerate construction. The Green Party of England and Wales has called for a full moratorium on major new projects; Labour rejected it, citing investment, employment and national security.

The quote that haunts the argument

There is a second Osborne quote that any honest account of Sunday’s speech has to sit alongside the first. In June, interviewed by Bloomberg at the Founders Forum, the same man said the quiet part out loud about the very concept he is now invoking: “Sovereignty is an illusion. No data centre will be sovereign. It will need chips from Taiwan, tech from China, software from the US and so much more.”

Both statements cannot be the whole truth at once. In June, sovereignty was an illusion because every datacentre on earth sits at the end of a supply chain it does not control — TSMC wafers, Dutch lithography, American software, Chinese manufacturing. In September, blocking a datacentre in Britain is a “loss of some sovereign control.” The reconciliation is possible but narrow: what a country controls by hosting compute is not the technology but the leverage — jurisdiction, planning consent, tax, security requirements, the ability to look inside the building. That is a real thing. It is also a considerably smaller thing than the word “sovereignty” implies, and OpenAI’s own executive is on camera saying so.

The episode is a neat demonstration of how the sovereignty pitch flexes to fit the sales cycle. When the audience is a conference of founders and the goal is to manage government expectations, sovereignty is an illusion. When the audience is a British festival crowd and the goal is to soften planning resistance, sovereignty is a treasure that nimbys are carelessly throwing away.

The timing is not accidental

Osborne’s intervention lands at a delicate moment for OpenAI’s British ambitions. The company paused its Stargate UK investment in April 2026, citing high energy costs and the regulatory environment, saying it would proceed when regulation and the cost of energy allowed — a decision The Times reported as a blow to the government’s AI superpower agenda. In the same month, Osborne was in Canada telling a Toronto summit that Canada had the energy and land Britain was struggling to provide. The September rhetoric — build now or lose the capacity to America — reads partly as pressure aimed at un-pausing that decision: a public framing of the trade-off designed to make refusal look like national self-harm rather than a bargaining position.

It also lands in a week when the bosses of OpenAI and Anthropic are meeting world leaders at the UN General Assembly in New York amid debate over superintelligent AI and its regulation. Osborne defended the spectacle as reassuring: “The fact that corporate leaders are sitting down with the presidents and prime ministers of the world in the UN security council I would say actually shouldn’t be alarming. It’s actually reassuring that people are beginning to try to use the kind of institutions of the world to think about how we regulate this new technology.”

Verity Harding, head of the AI and geopolitics project at Cambridge University’s Bennett School for Public Policy, offered a different reading of why the protests are happening at all: “The reason everyone hates datacentres has nothing to do with datacentres. It’s the only tangible thing to protest against … [people] just don’t like what’s happening and they don’t feel that anybody’s in control or thinking about the impact of it. It’s exactly because the tech industry execs are talking in this ridiculous way … You cannot go out on the one hand and say this [AI] might kill everybody one week and then the next week go and appear at a big sales conference saying that you should integrate it into your business.”

What is actually being negotiated

Strip away the nimby framing and the sovereignty banner, and the British datacentre fight is a negotiation over three things the public has not yet been given: an honest accounting of water and energy draw in the places where facilities are proposed; a definition of which workloads genuinely need to be domestic for security reasons, versus which can run offshore without national cost; and a price — in housing, grid investment, community benefit — that host communities can extract in return for hosting critical infrastructure they did not ask for.

The government’s own position already concedes part of this: official policy acknowledges that some workloads can remain offshore while strategically important capability stays in Britain. The unresolved question, as the protests from London to Edinburgh make clear, is how much capacity genuinely needs to be built at home — and what communities can credibly demand in exchange.

Osborne is right about one thing: the datacentres will be built somewhere, and where they are built matters. His June self was right about something too: no building makes a country sovereign over a technology it imports wholesale. The space between those two truths is where Britain’s actual decision lives — and it deserves a better quality of argument than “nimby” on one side and “Ohio” on the other.