Drawing an analogy with the pleasing aesthetics of St Pancras and King’s Cross railway stations, the UK government’s minister for artificial intelligence and online safety, Kanishka Narayan MP, used his presentation at this week’s AI Summit, part of London Tech Week, to encourage datacentre builds that people can be proud of.
“Our industrial legacy is written into the British landscape,” he said. “Infrastructure shapes how people feel about the places they live in. Those of you who have the misfortune of arriving here via Euston Station would appreciate this truth.”
Narayan pointed out that St Pancras was built for the railway age – to move people, goods and opportunity across the country. “But it was also built with civic ambition and enhanced London and embodied the ambition of our communities,” he said.
In contrast, Narayan described Euston as “a functional, but frankly bland and ugly building” – a symbol of what happens when architects forget the civic purpose of infrastructure.
“Datacentres are the new railway stations, power stations, telephone exchanges of the intelligence economy,” he said. “They will power the models, the services, the business and public tools that will define the next industrial revolution. They are also set in real places, near real communities.”
Rather than being buildings that communities tolerate or put up with, Narayan called for datacentres’ build design to be something people can be proud of.
Narayan used his speech to announce the RIBA x DSIT Data Centre Design Challenge, a government-backed design competition run by the Department for Science Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) that seeks to ensure that as datacentres grow, they deliver for the communities around them too.
The idea is to encourage collaboration between architects, designers, engineers and communities to raise the bar on high-quality design, meaningful public engagement and sustainable environmental outcomes, which, according to DSIT, will reimagine datacentres not just as critical national infrastructure, but as places of genuine civic value.
He said the competition aims to raise the bar of datacentre design and is the first government-backed competition where architects, designers and engineers are being asked to design datacentres “with meaningful public engagement, strong environmental outcomes and genuine civic value”.
He added: “If a community is helping power the AI age, it should be able to see that contribution with pride.”
AI that works for workers
Along with the datacentre design competition, the UK government is also encouraging a more pro-work approach to AI deployment.
During his speech at the AI Summit, Narayan said the government is launching a Pro-Worker AI Adoption Prize, which he said would celebrate organisations adopting pro-worker AI, encouraging other firms to follow their lead.
“We want businesses, workers, unions and investors to nominate organisations at the cutting edge of pro-worker AI adoption – not just adopting AI, but using AI to create new products, new jobs and new tasks in a way that boosts the demand for human expertise,” he said.
The top 50 organisations nominated will be shortlisted by an expert panel of judges, chaired by the Nobel Memorial Prize-winning economist Simon Johnson.
“Business cases of pro-worker AI adoption will be written up and taught in leading UK business schools so the next generation of people in this country look at pro-worker AI adoption too,” Narayan added.
