Source: The Register
Britain's energy crisis is creating a perverse incentive structure where companies rational-actor their way out of the sovereign AI ecosystem the government is trying to build. One in five firms have already moved AI projects abroad, primarily to cheaper power jurisdictions. The policy contradiction is acute: ministers want to nurture homegrown AI capacity while energy price controls remain absent, making overseas compute economically inevitable for any firm running large language models or training operations. This mirrors historical manufacturing offshoring patterns, except the fleeing asset is computational rather than physical, and the arbitrage is measured in pence per kilowatt-hour rather than labor costs.