Xlinks faces a £13.8B fight over Devon AI campus

Xlinks has secured 850 acres for a proposed 1.5GW AI datacentre and 1.8GW battery campus in North Devon, a £13.8bn project whose extreme-case water estimate reaches 2.9bn litres a year. The Guardian’s report on the Devon campus says five buildings would rise 50–130 feet, while Xlinks forecasts 600–1,200 jobs and says the revised design will be water self-sufficient; no formal planning application has yet been submitted. For builders, the grid-headroom analysis and Crusoe’s delivery-backed capacity case show why power, water, and planning—not GPU count alone—set deployment risk.