ENERGY FOR AI x AI FOR ENERGY
An invitation-only evening on where artificial intelligence and the energy transition meet, at the Barclays Innovation Hub powered by Eagle Labs in Shoreditch. The evening also marks four years of SOLR AI.
About this evening
The UK has some of the most expensive industrial electricity in the developed world, and AI has an energy problem.
Cheap, abundant, resilient power is now the binding constraint on artificial intelligence. Not chips, not capital. Energy. It decides where data centres get built, which countries get to host frontier AI, and whether Britain competes or falls behind. It is the defining infrastructure question of the next decade.
This is an evening about the energy layer of the AI stack: how we build power fast enough to run the intelligence we are betting the economy on, how AI is used to deploy that power in the first place, and how we do all of this without unravelling the sustainable energy transition.
The detail
An evening at the Barclays Innovation Hub
Places are limited and entry is by approval. Request yours in the panel.
Why this conversation
Two arms of one government, planning two futures that cannot both be true
Right now, the vast majority of the electricity running the world’s data centres has nothing to do with AI. It is your email, your bank, the films you stream, the cloud everything already sits on. The internet was one of the planet’s largest power consumers long before LLMs.
Now put AI stacked on top. Global data centre demand is set to roughly double by 2030. Almost everything we do already runs through these buildings, and soon that will be even more true.
Britain says it wants to lead. Serious capital and policy are going into sovereign compute and sovereign frontier models, our own AI, run on our own soil. Good. We should.
Just as much is going the other way, into making our energy resilient, decentralised and clean enough for a habitable world beyond net zero. Also good. Also non-negotiable.
But these two worlds barely talk. The government’s science and tech department, DSIT, is planning for gigawatts of new AI data centre capacity by 2030. Its energy department, DESNZ, the one that has to make the carbon and the grid add up, built its plan around the entire commercial services sector growing by a far smaller amount in the same period. Two arms of one government, planning two futures that cannot both be true.
And here is the part neither side can dodge. None of it works unless the infrastructure moves as one. Sovereign AI is not a flag you plant, it is a thing you have to power. It rests on data centres, and data centres rest on cheap, abundant, clean energy. That energy is the fertile ground. It is what lets hyperscalers build here, what lets compute run, what lets the industries, transport and services we want to lead in actually grow.
Get the energy right and everything becomes possible on top of it. Get it wrong and sovereign AI is a press release.
That is the conversation we are putting in a room on 12 August, after four years of building SOLR AI at exactly this intersection.
What to expect
Energy for AI, and AI for energy
An evening on the two-way relationship between artificial intelligence and energy: the power the AI build-out demands, and the role AI plays in delivering clean energy at scale. Two panels, a live demonstration of what we are building, and the people working on both sides of the problem.
Speakers from across energy and AI, with the SOLR AI founding team.
The panels
Two panels on how Britain powers AI without unravelling the energy transition, with voices from across energy and AI.
The live demonstration
SOLR AI assessing and designing a real site, live in the room.
The calendar
More events from SOLR AI
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