A Guardian investigation has found that the British government’s flagship AI infrastructure program, touted as a £31 billion-plus investment wave, is partly built on company-provided figures that no government body has audited or independently verified. Reporters visited several promised construction sites and found little evidence of the projects they were meant to contain.
The most striking example is Nscale’s announced “largest UK sovereign AI datacentre” in Loughton, Essex, described in January 2025 press releases as a $2.5 billion investment with a contract to deliver a supercomputing facility by 2026.
When Guardian journalists visited the site in February, it was still being used as a scaffolding storage yard by a London-based company. Land registry records do not show Nscale as the owner of the property.
The company submitted a planning application — after the Guardian began making inquiries. Asked directly, a government spokesperson confirmed the $2.5 billion figure came from Nscale itself and was not independently verified.
A Scaffolding Yard Where a $2.5 Billion Supercomputer Was Supposed to Stand
CoreWeave’s separately announced £1 billion UK “investment” largely involved renting existing London facilities rather than building new ones, according to the investigation.
“Big tech companies artificially inflate datacentres’ job creation and economic impact to please governments like the British one, which are desperate to claim they are making the economy grow,” said Dr. Cecilia Rikap, of UCL’s Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose.
The broader picture, the investigation suggests, is a government accepting headline numbers from the same companies that benefit from the political goodwill those numbers generate.
The Bank of England Is Already Watching for the Next Dot-Com Bubble
The Bank of England has been watching the underlying financial structure of the buildout with concern since late 2025. In a blog post, the bank noted that AI investment had been “an outsized driver of US GDP growth” but warned that “if the projected scale of debt-financed AI and associated energy infrastructure investment materializes over this decade, financial stability risks are likely to grow.”
The bank explicitly referenced the dot-com bubble as a historical comparator while noting the macroeconomic context differs. There is now $48 billion in data center asset-backed and commercial mortgage-backed securities outstanding, representing 61% of the total outstanding securities market.
On the ground, the scramble for “powered land” has taken on characteristics familiar from previous speculative cycles. Dame Dawn Childs, chief executive of Pure Data Centres, described developers “sending out on a daily basis: ‘we’ve got this significant plot of land with all of these megawatts of power in the middle of nowhere — buy it for a gazillion pounds.'”
Scrappy industrial sites are being repriced as AI gigafactories. Whether those prices hold depends on AI demand materializing at the scale that justified them — a question that Britain’s government, by its own admission, has not rigorously tried to answer.