Debate contribution: Artificial Intelligence Strategy

Debate contribution by Mr Colin McGrath on 14 September 2026.

MLA: Mr Colin McGrath
Party at the time: Social Democratic and Labour Party
Date: 14 September 2026
Type: Debate contribution
Business: Opposition Business
Heading: Artificial Intelligence Strategy
Assembly identifier: Official Report component 5686037

Text

I beg to move
Artificial intelligence might operate in the cloud, but there is nothing weightless about it. Underpinning every AI system, every image generated, every answer produced and every calculation made are physical buildings, servers, cables, electricity, water and land. This debate is about the strategic direction of AI, not individual data centres or where they will be sited. This is a legislative Chamber, not a planning committee meeting hall. We know that centres will be needed in the future, but we must get right the context of the landscape that they sit in. It is important that the debate does not become a simple argument about whether you are for or against artificial intelligence. Whether we like it or not, AI is here. Some people's experience of AI might still be fairly harmless, such as asking it to tidy up an email or to produce a poster for a local club. For others, it might be about generating one of those slightly terrifying photographs that reminds us all of what we looked like in the 1980s. If that were the extent of it, we probably would not need to have this debate. However, that is not the extent of it; AI is becoming more powerful, sophisticated and accessible by the day. We should be ambitious about what AI could mean for the North. There are enormous opportunities. AI can help businesses to become more productive and help to grow our economy, and it could help us to deliver better public services. We already have almost 200 companies here developing AI solutions and employing more than 1,300 specialists. Nobody should leave the debate thinking that the SDLP is against AI, technology or investment in centres; we are not. However, there are challenges with AI. Some of the starkest warnings about AI have come from not the people who are opposed to the technology but those who have helped to develop it. Leading researchers and figures in the industry have warned that sufficiently advanced AI could ultimately pose an existential risk to humanity. There are profound questions to consider. What happens to someone's job when a machine can suddenly do the work for them? What happens to our privacy when enormous amounts of information about us can be analysed almost instantaneously? AI might live in the cloud, but that cloud has to live somewhere. Data centres require huge amounts of electricity. They need connections to the grid; they need land; and, depending on their design, they can require significant amounts of water for cooling. Consider that in the context of Northern Ireland. We already know about the pressures on our electricity grid. We already know about the pressures on our water and waste water infrastructure and the lack of progress from the Infrastructure Minister on addressing them. At the same time, we have legally binding climate targets and a requirement to dramatically increase the amount of electricity generated from renewable sources. Before we approve swathes of data centres, it is surely sensible to understand their consequences. We do not need to speculate about what happens when data centre growth races ahead of infrastructure; we have only to look across the border. In the South, data centres accounted for 23% of metered electricity consumption in 2025. A decade before, that figure was just 5%. Ireland's Climate Change Advisory Council has warned that increasing demand from data centres has offset some of the gains that have been made through renewable generation. That should be a warning to all of us. That is why we are proposing a measured approach to the development of those centres, and that such permissions be set against the backdrop of a coherent strategy that monitors the development of the sector.
We are simply saying that, before we build many of these centres, we should understand how much electricity those developments will consume, where that electricity will come from, what investment in the grid will be needed, how many permanent jobs they will create and, crucially, what benefit they will provide to the communities that are asked to host them. Technological progress should serve people. Being ambitious does not mean saying yes to everything, however, and being pro-investment does not mean abandoning our responsibility to ask whether an investment is right for this place. The question is not whether artificial intelligence will change Northern Ireland, because it will. The question is whether we will shape that change or allow that change to shape us.

746 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

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