TL;DR
BoE’s Bailey says AI will soon do more than power grids can handle, forcing trade-offs between healthcare, defence, and other sectors.
Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey warned on Friday that artificial intelligence may need to be rationed because the power supply cannot keep up with its capabilities. He said companies and governments face “very big social choices” as energy constraints force trade-offs between sectors. The question is not whether AI can do more, but whether there is enough electricity to let it.
“AI is probably going to fairly soon be at a point where it can do more things, more big things than we have the power supply to achieve,” Bailey said at an event in Kirkcaldy, Scotland, with Bloomberg’s Stephanie Flanders and former Cabinet minister Ed Balls.
He framed the dilemma as a choice between competing priorities. “Do we want to make more very big breakthroughs in health?” he asked. Or “do we want to make more breakthroughs in drone technology to fight the Russians in Ukraine?” Bailey said the issue of potential trade-offs was recently raised with him by the head of a large AI firm, whom he did not name.
The concern is not theoretical. The EU recently asked households to cut electricity use during peak hours because AI data centres are straining the grid. US utilities plan to spend $1.4 trillion on infrastructure by 2030 to cope with the data centre boom. Every megawatt allocated to AI is a megawatt unavailable for housing or manufacturing.
Bailey has previously argued that the UK economy is stuck between waves of technological innovation. The last wave was the internet. He sees AI as the most likely candidate to be the next general-purpose technology, but has cautioned that productivity benefits will take time to materialise.
On employment, Bailey was less alarmed. He said AI will both create and destroy jobs, pointing to roles like data scientists as examples of new positions that will emerge. “There will be jobs that don’t exist anymore,” he added, but signalled he is not concerned about a surge in mass unemployment.
That tracks with broader warnings that the UK’s AI ambitions may collide with its climate commitments. Bailey’s comments suggest the collision extends beyond carbon: the fundamental constraint may be physical infrastructure that simply cannot be built fast enough.
