A tech company has said it still plans to build the UK's largest AI data centre despite Microsoft pulling out of the project. Nscale announced last year it had pledged £2bn to build and open a pioneering facility in Loughton, Essex. However, the BBC understands that Microsoft, which said it would fund a supercomputer at the site, has terminated its involvement…..The data centre was due to receive its power supply at the end of the year. But as first reported by the Telegraph on Sunday, Nscale has been told this will not happen until the 2030s.

As the AI firms measure success by tokenmaxxing and usage, they're incentivized to use ever more electricity. Most everyday use cases don't need frontier models. In a more rational world, they'd be done by smaller hyper-efficient Chinese models. Now economics may force those decisions.

Microsoft pulls out of UK's largest AI data centre