Campaign groups are taking the UK government to court over Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner's controversial decision to override local authorities and approve a massive 90-megawatt data center on protected green belt land in Buckinghamshire, escalating tensions between AI infrastructure ambitions and environmental concerns.
The UK government is facing its first major legal test of Labour's aggressive push to build AI infrastructure. Campaign groups Foxglove and Global Action Plan filed a formal planning statutory review Thursday, asking courts to overturn Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner's controversial approval of a hyperscale data center that local authorities had rejected three separate times.
The 90-megawatt facility planned for Buckinghamshire represents exactly the kind of infrastructure bottleneck that's hampering Britain's AI ambitions. But it's also become a flashpoint for deeper tensions about environmental costs and democratic planning processes. Buckinghamshire council rejected the project again in June 2024, calling development on protected green belt land "inappropriate." Rayner overruled them anyway last month, wielding new powers designed to fast-track critical infrastructure.
"Angela Rayner appears to either not know the difference between a power station that actually produces energy and a substation that just links you to the grid — or simply not care," Foxglove Co-executive Director Rosa Curling said in Thursday's statement. The criticism cuts to the heart of Labour's infrastructure strategy: prioritizing capacity over local concerns, even when the power grid implications remain unclear.
The timing couldn't be more pointed. Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced plans in January to block what he called "Nimby" legal challenges to major infrastructure projects. Yet here are campaigners doing exactly that, armed with legitimate concerns about power consumption that mirror growing global anxiety about AI's environmental impact. OpenAI's ChatGPT and similar systems have indeed driven unprecedented demand for computing capacity, but at enormous energy costs that utilities worldwide are struggling to meet.