If an AI data centre opened near you, would you support it for the jobs and economic reasons?

Britain's verdict on data centres, carried by the narrowest of margins, was really two verdicts stitched together — a country of older voters cautiously open to the jobs pitch, and a youngest cohort that rejected it almost outright. The headline split disguises how decisive that generational break actually was.

The sharpest divide here is not the topline four points but the age gradient beneath it: only a fifth of 16-24s backed a data centre near them, against clear majorities among the 55-64s and the 65-plus voters. That inversion is telling — the generation meant to inherit these jobs was the most sceptical of them, while older voters, less exposed to the labour-market promise and perhaps less anxious about housing land and grid strain reshaping their future, were readier to take the economic case on trust. Gender, by contrast, barely moved the needle, splitting evenly on both sides.

The result sits squarely on the fault line running through Britain's net-zero and growth politics — the tension between headline investment pledges and the lived reality of subsidised power, strained grids and thin local hiring that critics of AI Growth Zones have pointed to. It is the same scepticism that has met freeports, HS2 and other "growth zone" promises before it: enthusiasm at the top, doubt closer to the ground.

What tipped the floor's debate was less data than temperament. The most-respected Yes voice waved away doubters with "Obviously. AI is the future," dismissing critics as "boomers and art majors," while the top No voice needed only three words to land its objection: "Insufficient energy transmission."

A wafer-thin Yes, then, built less on shared conviction than on which generation happened to show up — and a No case that, however curtly put, spoke to the grid anxieties still unresolved.