By Jonathan Portes
Publication Date: 2026-03-13 15:35:00
Ono trillion Dollar. This is the level of financial aid that Gordon Brown triumphantly announced at the G20 summit in London in 2009. (I contributed my own two cents here.) However, it wasn’t entirely real: the number was a mix of already promised apples and ambitious future oranges.
So it should come as little surprise that when ministers announced last year that the UK was attracting billions of pounds of new investment in AI, they were more than sparing with the truth. As a Guardian investigation found, much of this turns out to be nothing new at all: existing data centers have been rented rather than built, a supercomputer site hasn’t even been commissioned yet, promised investments that may never materialize, and claims about job creation have little or no connection to reality. The headlines are impressive. The underlying reality is less so.
This shouldn’t surprise anyone who spends a minute thinking about how the economy actually works. Companies don’t make billions in investments…
