Owen Thomas, CEO and Senior Consultant at Red Oak Consulting, explains why the next phase of AI growth in the UK will depend not just on compute ambition, but on the power and cooling systems that can support it. Artificial intelligence is advancing at pace. In the UK, however, its growth is meeting a hard physical reality. The systems that power and cool our data centres are under strain, and in key regions, grid capacity is tightening. AI ambition is running into a heat and power wall.