In April, OpenAI paused Stargate UK and named regulation and the cost of energy among its reasons. Britain's AI strategy is colliding with its electricity system.

This week I go through the numbers. What Britain has promised on artificial intelligence, what it would take to power it, and the distance between the two. Why the connection queue is a symptom and the price is the disease. And what is quietly filling the gap while nobody votes on it: gas, behind fences, on private wires, because a gas connection takes months and a grid connection can take fifteen years.

Then the part almost nobody in Whitehall is discussing. Enhanced geothermal has moved from pilot operation to utility-scale contracts, and one of the strongest known resources in Britain sits under Cornwall. Peer-reviewed analysis puts the Cornubian batholith's modelled technical potential at 31 GWe. We currently generate three megawatts from it.

I explain how the technology actually works, step by step, and I do not skip the objections: induced seismicity and the politics of anything that resembles fracking, the cost of drilling hot granite, and the land and consent problem of co-locating data centres in rural Cornwall. Plus six things Britain should do about it.

Also this week: my Yorkshire Post column on Britain's dependence on American technology, and the layoff tracker, where Uber cut 3,300 roles and pointedly declined to blame AI for it.

Read the full issue with every source at thesundaysignal.ai

OpenAI paused a British data centre over energy costs. Nuclear arrives in the mid-2030s. Solar cannot run a training cluster in December. So what powers Britain's AI? The answer may be two miles under Cornwall. Contains a shareholding disclosure.

Keywords:

enhanced geothermal, EGS, Fervo Energy, Cornwall, Cornubian batholith, United Downs, AI data centres, UK energy policy, grid connection queue, Ofgem, NESO, Clean Power 2030, industrial electricity prices, small modular reactors, Rolls-Royce SMR, Wylfa, OpenAI, Stargate UK, AI Growth Zones, North Sea transition, induced seismicity, contracts for difference, tech layoffs, Uber, Oracle, PayPal, David Richards, The Sunday Signal