The big questions answered

Across the UK, but particularly in the southeast of England, giant and featureless buildings are springing up.

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What's the environmental cost of using AI?

Despite their size, they're designed to be unobtrusive, and you won't spot any signage telling you what they are. Some 477 already stand, with another 100 to come in the next five years. In Blyth, near Newcastle, another 10 such structures covering 54 hectares will be constructed on the site of the former Blyth Power Station at a cost of £10 billion, with work due to start in 2031.

Though they look like warehouses, these aren't for storing goods. Instead, they are "computers in sheds", said Countryfile presenter Tom Heap in a recent edition of BBC Radio 4's Rare Earth: "Millions of computers, just like the ones we use but formed as servers, in racks in huge barns." Owned by mega corporations such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft, these data centres process internet traffic ranging from simple web searches to streaming services, cloud storage, online banking systems and cryptocurrencies.

The accelerating proliferation of data centres across the world is, though, primarily driven by the boom in the use of so-called artificial intelligence (AI). Modelling processes such as human language and behaviour is complex and demands an enormous amount of computing power. Hence the construction of huge barns full of servers devouring copious electricity.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology estimate that a single enquiry to ChatGPT (one of the most commonly used AI programmes, created by OpenAI) consumes about five times more electricity than a simple web search. It's also been estimated that training a large language model such as OpenAI's GPT-3 uses electricity equivalent to the power consumed annually by 130 US homes.