Overview
- Verdant published its analysis on Wednesday and estimated existing UK datacentres employ about 4,400 direct staff and that planned sites will add roughly 10,400 permanent operational jobs by 2035.
- Tech industry group techUK and a government spokesperson immediately disputed Verdant’s methods, saying the thinktank used a small sample and that its jobs-per-megawatt comparison misreads industry data.
- The disagreement stems from different metrics: techUK uses about 8.5 jobs per megawatt while Verdant’s capacity‑weighted review of 20 projects finds roughly 1.2 jobs per megawatt and predicts automation will cut headcounts further.
- Verdant warned that datacentres demand large amounts of electricity and sometimes water, making local resource pressure and drought risk central to planning debates and prompting calls for tighter controls or pauses on new builds.
- The dispute now forces a policy choice between prioritising sovereign AI compute capacity, which government and industry say matters for security and growth, or pausing expansion to set clearer rules on jobs, energy and water use.