Ministers assure us that Britain’s gleaming new data centres represent a triumph of green ambition and digital destiny. A sworn declaration in a Tennessee courtroom suggests otherwise.
THE RATIONALS
One must admire the peculiar genius of the modern British government. It has somehow contrived to fund American weapons infrastructure on British soil through climate legislation, designate it as sovereign national assets, leave it standing in Russia’s sights, and present the entire arrangement to the electorate as a net zero success story. Lesser administrations might have blushed. This one has issued a press release.
The story begins, as the most revealing stories often do, somewhere nobody was looking. In a federal courthouse in Mississippi, lawyers for the Trump administration intervened in what appeared to be a perfectly routine environmental complaint.
Residents near Memphis, Tennessee, objected to xAI’s Colossus data centre complex operating dozens of gas-burning turbines without proper permits — the sort of procedural nuisance that corporations typically settle with a cheque and a muffled apology.
Instead, the Pentagon sent a sworn declaration.
Cameron Stanley, the US Department of War’s chief digital and artificial intelligence officer, submitted a sworn declaration arguing that xAI’s computing capacity was, in his precise formulation, “as foundational to our modern defence posture as traditional munitions production.”
He revealed that Elon Musk’s Grok AI is integrated into Maven Smart System, built and run by Palantir — the Pentagon’s primary AI targeting platform — and that this system had enabled American forces to “deploy over 2,000 munitions to 2,000 distinct targets within 96 hours during Operation Epic Fury.”
‘A gas turbine complaint, it turned out, had accidentally revealed what a British Substack had already worked out.’
In April of this year, we, The Rational Forum, published Britain’s AI Superpower: A Sermon in Small Print, observing that British households were being made to underwrite American-owned data centre infrastructure through their energy bills, under the agreeable banner of decarbonisation, while the strategic implications went conveniently unexamined.
It was, at the time, treated as the sort of thing one mentions before changing the subject.
The Pentagon’s court filing has since furnished it with rather more official corroboration than one typically receives.
To appreciate what Maven Smart System actually does, it is worth understanding the intellectual tradition from which it springs.
In 2021, a book was quietly published under the pen name “Brigadier General Y.S.” — later confirmed by multiple sources to be the sitting commander of Israel’s Unit 8200, the elite signals intelligence directorate. Its central argument was refreshingly candid: human beings are a bottleneck.
In modern conflict, the volume of targeting data overwhelms human cognitive capacity. The solution is artificial intelligence — a machine capable of generating “tens of thousands of targets” while humans provide what the author delicately described as the decision to attack.
The machine was duly built. It was called Lavender.
A 2024 investigation by +972 Magazine, drawing on testimony from six Israeli intelligence officers with direct operational experience, established that Lavender marked up to 37,000 Palestinians as assassination targets in the early weeks of the Gaza campaign.
Human oversight, in the event, consisted of a single officer spending approximately 20 seconds per target confirming that the AI’s selection was male rather than female — the assumption being that women were unlikely to be combatants, and that this single data point constituted sufficient independent verification.
The system carried a known 10 per cent error rate. Officers were not required to examine the underlying intelligence. One source described himself, with admirable economy, as “a stamp of approval.”
The army’s position, naturally, was that each target received rigorous individual assessment. The officers’ position was that they processed dozens per day and moved immediately to the next. Somewhere between these two accounts lies the doctrine that the Pentagon has now industrialised at American scale. Operation Epic Fury — 2,000 targets, 96 hours — is the Unit 8200 commander’s bottleneck theory rendered in ordnance.
None of this is to suggest that every data centre is a weapons platform, or that artificial intelligence is inherently military in nature. It is to observe that the specific companies now being subsidised onto British soil are, by their own governments’ sworn admission, already operating at the sharp end of exactly this doctrine.
Israel’s Unit 8200 built Lavender to put that doctrine into practice. America has confirmed, under oath in a federal court, that it now runs Maven on infrastructure built by the same companies now constructing the equivalent here — and Iran has struck the same hyperscalers’ facilities in the UAE and Bahrain, and explicitly threatened the Stargate campus in Abu Dhabi, on the stated grounds that they support American military and intelligence operations. Recent history in the Middle East does not require inference. It has been entered into evidence.
It is this system, and these companies, that Britain is now paying to house.
The Wapseys Wood campus in Buckinghamshire — granted Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project status, to be built on a former landfill beside the M40 — will draw up to 300 megawatts, supported by an on-site gas-fired power station of 270 up to 350 megawatts, included for “resilience.” The word resilience is doing considerable work in that sentence.
At Cottam in Nottinghamshire, an £11 billion project promises a gigawatt of power from American-designed small modular reactors. Further sites at Hartlepool and Wylfa are at earlier stages of the same process. The technology is American. The operational revenues, once the facilities are leased to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and Google, will be American.
The funding, however, is refreshingly local.
The Nuclear Regulated Asset Base levy — applied to every electricity bill in the United Kingdom from November 2025, rising quarterly — transfers the construction risk of nuclear projects onto consumer tariffs before a single watt has been generated.
Households pay it regardless of whether they source renewable electricity. It funds Sizewell C and, under the same model, the small modular reactor projects whose primary practical function is to provide reliable power to data centre campuses operated by companies the Pentagon has just confirmed are essential to its kill chain.
The AI Growth Zone scheme offers electricity discounts of up to £24 per megawatt-hour in Scotland, £16 in Cumbria, and £14 in the North East to data centre operators — savings estimated by the government’s own modelling at up to £80 million annually for a single 500-megawatt facility. Those savings are not conjured from the ether. They represent costs exempted from the operators’ bills, redistributed across all remaining consumers.
Curiously, the government has not published the aggregate cost to the average household — and when the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology was asked directly whether any such cost transfer occurs, it declined to answer.
The grid itself requires a £28 billion upgrade to accommodate projected data centre demand. Grid charges on the average household bill are set to rise sharply by 2031 as part of a £108 addition to annual bills confirmed by Ofgem.
Energy Secretary Ed Miliband acknowledged in correspondence with MPs that the climate impact of data centres is “inherently uncertain” — a formulation that raises the question of what, precisely, the net zero modelling has been accounting for if not the infrastructure being subsidised in net zero’s name.
The costs, to borrow a phrase of almost classical elegance in its understatement, are socialised.
On 10 March 2026, Dame Chi Onwurah, the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne Central and West, opened a Technology Sovereignty debate in Westminster Hall. She raised Palantir’s deepening role in NHS data management, the risks of cloud dependence, and cited Elon Musk’s earlier decision to restrict Starlink access in Ukraine as a cautionary illustration of what reliance on American infrastructure means in practice during a conflict. It was a serious speech about serious concerns.
It was also, through no fault of its author, conducted in almost complete ignorance of the most relevant fact, that the Pentagon, in sworn testimony submitted to a federal court, had just described this category of infrastructure as the functional equivalent of a munitions factory.
The Cyber Security and Resilience Bill, progressing through Parliament in January 2026, formally extended Critical National Infrastructure designation to large data centres. Ministers presented this as protective.
In the light of the court filing, it reads rather differently. Britain has granted its highest infrastructure classification to facilities the United States government regards as weapons systems, apparently without asking what military functions those facilities perform.
The Defence Investment Plan that might have addressed such questions was promised for Autumn 2025. It remains, at the time of writing, unpublished — detained, reports suggest, by a disagreement between the Treasury and everyone else about the cost of taking the situation seriously.
One notes, in passing, that Iran did not wait for the Defence Investment Plan before publishing its own list of legitimate targets. That list, released following the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ strikes on Amazon Web Services facilities in the UAE in March 2026 — the first deliberate kinetic attacks on commercial hyperscale data centres in recorded history — named the same hyperscalers now being fast-tracked through the British planning system.
The IRGC was helpfully explicit about its reasoning, the facilities supported American and Israeli military and intelligence operations, including AI-driven targeting analysis hosted on commercial platforms.
The Iranian targeting doctrine and the Pentagon’s court filing are, in other words, in complete agreement about what these buildings are. It is only the British government that appears uncertain.
The same company entrusted with the medical records of approximately 56 million NHS patients is, by sworn American testimony, integral to an operational AI-powered kill chain that fired some 2,000 munitions in 96 hours.
The Technology Sovereignty debate presented this as a question of sovereignty — the firm’s access to patient records, the political worldview of its founder, the broader question of what a private American defence contractor was doing at the heart of British healthcare. The Pentagon filing reframes it as something rather more immediate.
That is not a sovereignty concern in the abstract. That is the contractor holding your medical records who also knows, with some precision, how to prosecute a modern war. A planning permission, it should be noted, is not sovereignty — particularly over infrastructure that another government has sworn in open court is as foundational to its defence posture as traditional munitions production.
A further detail, unavailable to that debate, sharpens the picture to the point of embarrassment. In February 2026, Anthropic — whose Claude model had been embedded in Pentagon classified networks — refused to lift contractual restrictions preventing its technology from being used for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons.
The Pentagon designated it a supply-chain risk. President Trump ordered a government-wide ban. Within hours, rivals moved to fill the vacancy. xAI, already in discussions and unburdened by such scruples, formalised its position shortly thereafter. The company that said no was banned. The company that said yes has since, by sworn Pentagon testimony, helped prosecute a war.
Britain is now subsidising the infrastructure that made the second outcome possible — and has not, at the despatch box or anywhere else, been asked whether that was quite what it intended.
This might all be filed under uncomfortable but manageable were it not for one further detail, which is that the government has simultaneously been warning the public that Russia intends to attack NATO within four to five years and that critical infrastructure is Russia’s preferred first target.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte stated that Russia could be ready to use military force against a NATO member within five years. The government has since compressed this timeline to four years. General Sir Patrick Sanders, former Chief of the General Staff, called conflict with Russia by 2030 a “realistic possibility,” and noted that earlier conversations about building underground bunkers and command centres had stalled because officials felt the cost was too high and the threat insufficiently imminent.
In March and April of this year, a Russian attack submarine spent over a month in the UK’s exclusive economic zone conducting what the Ministry of Defence described, with magnificent understatement, as “nefarious activity over critical undersea infrastructure.”
Responding at a Downing Street press conference, former Defence Secretary John Healey addressed Moscow directly: “To President Putin, I say this — we see you. We see your activity over our cables and pipelines.” The same cables and pipelines that feed the data centres his government has designated Critical National Infrastructure, subsidised through energy levies, and declined to subject to a defence review.
GCHQ Director Anne Keast-Butler, in a public lecture in May, warned that Russia is “relentlessly targeting critical infrastructure” and “scaling up its daily hybrid activity against the UK and Europe, stretching from the seabed to cyberspace.” She called cybersecurity “ten times more urgent.” The National Cyber Security Centre reported that the incidents it managed more than doubled in 2025.
The British Army, meanwhile, stands at 73,790 regular personnel — less than half its Cold War strength — facing a £28 billion funding shortfall. In March 2026, Russia launched approximately 6,460 one-way attack drones against Ukraine in a single month, continuing a sustained pattern of industrial-scale drone production that shows no sign of slowing.
The government’s response to this arithmetic has included raising the recall age for the Strategic Reserve to 65, on the basis that veterans in their seventh decade represent an untapped reservoir of expertise. One pictures them, with some affection, guarding American cloud servers against drone swarms in the Buckinghamshire countryside.
The adversaries, by contrast, appear to have their paperwork in order.
The position, stated plainly, is this, the government warns that Russia’s doctrine targets critical infrastructure first, then designates American-owned data centres — whose military function the Pentagon has confirmed under oath — as Critical National Infrastructure, then funds them through climate levies, then leaves the defence plan that would address how any of this gets protected unpublished because the Treasury will not agree the figures.
A sworn declaration in a Tennessee gas turbine case did not create this situation. It merely described it, under oath, in a federal court, for the administrative purpose of protecting a data centre campus from an environmental injunction. The Pentagon did not intend to illuminate British energy policy. It was trying to keep its servers running. The illumination was, one might say, collateral.
What the filing confirmed is what the targeting doctrine pioneered in Gaza and weaponised by two hostile states had already implied, what a parliamentary debate had circled without quite landing on, and what this publication identified in April, that the infrastructure being built on British soil, funded through British energy bills, classified as British national assets, and theoretically protected by a British army at its smallest in living memory, is not the green digital future ministers describe at the dispatch box. It is, by the Pentagon’s own account, a munitions supply chain.
The difference is that munitions factories have generally been subject to a defence review before someone agrees to build them next to the M40.
The ordinary British taxpayer is entitled, at minimum, to know what they are subsidising. They are paying the Nuclear RAB levy. They are paying the grid upgrade charges. They are paying the redistributed cost of the AI Growth Zone electricity discounts. They are doing all of this under the impression that they are contributing to a clean energy transition.
It will be on British soil. That much is true. Everything else about the arrangement — the ownership, the profits, the operational purpose, the active hostility of two of the world’s most capable adversaries — suggests that “British” is doing rather more work in that sentence than it can comfortably bear.
Somewhere in Britain this month, a household opened an energy bill, paid the Nuclear RAB levy, paid the grid upgrade charge, and believed both kept the lights on. Nobody told them they were also helping to power a kill chain.
The bill has already arrived. It is the one on your doormat.
The Rational Forum publishes fact-based analysis on under-reported stories at the intersection of policy, power, and public interest. Read the original investigation: Britain’s AI Superpower: A Sermon in Small Print.
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(UKR)