I'd imagine that a large part of the demand for data centres in the South is driven by the need for extreme low latency with the City of London and other financial centres like Frankfurt.
It's all well to say there should be more incentive to build data centres in the North, but physics is physics.
Low latency is desirable for stock traders. Most of the data center growth isn't driven by that but by non latency critical workloads such as AI.
The reason, data centers choose to be near London is because there is no pricing advantage to go up north. Even though energy is plentiful, readily accessible, and often curtailed when there's too much of it there. If there was a pricing difference, you'd see a lot more economic activity up north.
Basically the physical advantage is there but the lack of economics cover it up and wipe out the advantage.
It seems fine that financial centers subsidise other regions. GP wasn't asking to ban building the data centers there, just make it more expensive. Because the delivery is more expensive.
which is why the price in electricity isn't truly being reflected properly by the cost of distribution.
If it costs less up north, then there would be incentive to move demand there (for data centers, which is more location agnostic). But if the price is the same up north, then the locality becomes a deciding factor.
that's not a jungle, rights come from a social contract and all the complicated social technology we usually operate to try to manifest said rights.
in a jungle there are niches, and opportunities, and even though there are very strong participants, no one is invincible, especially outside their niche.
the jungle is a place where the social contract is decided by the physically strongest players. the strongest player in the jungle is the man and the jungle only exists because he decided to not level it and turn it into a palm oil farm. in that sense you're right, I completely agree, no one is invincible there.
The existing cluster of data centres in West London pre-dates the current AI boom, and the UK's "IT corridor" is generally based between London and Reading and Oxford and Cambridge. There's an emerging tech hub in the North West, but generally it's not there yet.
It's all well to say there should be more incentive to build data centres in the North, but physics is physics.