Blair's Think Tank Gave Fossil-Fuelled Tech Giants a Platform at Labour Conference

Picture your household energy bill, then multiply it by ten. That's roughly the computing leap a single ChatGPT query takes over a standard Google search, according to Global Action Plan. Now imagine that leap happening billions of times a day, powered increasingly by gas plants, and you start to see why what happened at this year's Labour Party conference in Liverpool matters far beyond the conference halls.

The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, the think tank led by the former prime minister, hosted a string of panels at the gathering that were sponsored by and featured senior figures from Google DeepMind and OpenAI. These are two of the companies driving what's become a global scramble to build data centres, many of them powered by fossil fuels, to run artificial intelligence systems.

Two of the sessions were bankrolled by Google DeepMind and featured its senior director Owen Larter. One, on how AI can "transform the state," included former Conservative Cabinet minister and current Spectator editor Michael Gove. Gove told the audience that Blair himself should join the Cabinet to oversee AI's rollout into public services. He warned that resisting mass AI deployment would leave Britain "in the position that Japan was in for 1850: feudal, backward, overtaken, incapable of feeding or protecting your people."

A separate event, sponsored by OpenAI, put the Labour government's AI minister Kanishka Narayan in conversation with the company. OpenAI also held a private reception attended by Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden and Trade Minister Lord Anas Sarwar. This is, in plain terms, corporate access dressed as policy dialogue, and it's happening inside the governing party's own conference.

The Emissions Behind the Enthusiasm

Here's the part that got little airtime in those rooms. Google dropped its 2030 net-zero pledge last year and has been striking deals with fossil fuel producers to keep its servers running, including hooking into a huge new gas plant in Texas expected to emit more than the entire city of San Francisco. An analysis by the Financial Times' Sustainable Views found that 56 percent of Google's US data centres ran on fossil fuels in 2025. For OpenAI, the figure was 64 percent.

Think of a data centre as a factory that never sleeps, humming around the clock to process the questions we type into chatbots and the images we ask AI to generate. That factory needs constant power and enormous volumes of water for cooling. Multiply that by the thousands of data centres now planned worldwide and you have a genuine climate and resource problem, not a hypothetical one.

The UK government has already been caught flat-footed on this. It emerged in April that officials had underestimated data centre emissions by a factor of 100. Ministers now acknowledge these facilities could produce up to 123 million tonnes of carbon dioxide over the next decade, roughly equivalent to the annual emissions of 2.7 million people. Water UK, the trade body representing water companies, has separately warned there may not be enough water in the country to supply the industry's cooling needs.

Despite this, the government approved a data centre campus in Wapsys Wood, Buckinghamshire, in March, set to run on a 300-megawatt gas microgrid. Crucially, it was classified as "nationally significant infrastructure," a designation that lets the project bypass normal local planning rules and the community input that comes with them.

None of this is happening in a vacuum. Google and OpenAI's leadership have deep financial ties to the Trump administration, which has actively promoted fossil-fuelled data centres. OpenAI President Greg Brockman and his wife gave $25 million to the pro-Trump fund MAGA Inc. last year. CEO Sam Altman donated $1 million to Trump's second inauguration, matching a contribution from Google. Under Keir Starmer, Labour struck a £31 billion "Tech Prosperity Deal" with Trump last September, though the US paused it months later and it remains unclear how much of the associated AI investment is still moving forward.

At the Gove panel, Martha Dacombe of the Centre for British Progress argued the UK should lean into this dependency rather than resist it. "The only reasonable way we remain competitive is if we tie ourselves to the Americans," she said, suggesting Britain operate under an "American AI umbrella." Larter, for his part, claimed data centres would actually "drive the transition to a cleaner energy grid," a claim that sits awkwardly alongside Google's own retreat from its climate targets.

The financial relationship between the Tony Blair Institute and the tech industry runs deep. Oracle founder Larry Ellison gave the think tank £96.5 million between 2021 and 2023 alone, with total pledges reaching at least £257 million. Separate reporting from Democracy for Sale found the TBI runs a corporate membership scheme charging $25,000 a year for access to politicians, with undisclosed higher fees promising members "a greater role in shaping and informing the debates most relevant to you." Members reportedly include BP, Amazon, and Microsoft.

Blair himself has been an outspoken AI booster, cautioning governments against succumbing to a "techlash" and arguing countries can't protect themselves from AI by ignoring it. He has also called for expanding North Sea fossil fuel extraction and prioritising cheap energy over net-zero commitments, partly to keep pace with AI's power demands.

Why It Matters

What's missing from these conference-hall conversations is any real reckoning with cost. Communities near proposed data centres face rising water stress and strained local grids. Workers face warnings, some from AI's own architects, that automation could eliminate their jobs. And the planet faces a fresh wave of emissions just as climate targets slip further out of reach. When the institutions meant to shape public policy are bankrolled by the same companies whose practices they're meant to scrutinise, the public loses the independent judgment it depends on. That's not a technical detail. It's the whole point of having oversight in the first place.