Michael Dell, Lord Johnson and the ‘gun to the head’ meeting that ended a £15bn AI projectAI Pathfinder raised over £100m from investors before things took a turnIn December, billionaire Michael Dell opened an alarming email. By early January, a deal had been signed off by two directors, neither of them the founders and one of them Lord Johnson. Meanwhile, the Ayrshire site rests undeveloped, one of dozens of speculative data centre proposals across the UK that have yet to leave the drawing board. The regulator has proposed a new data centre “commitment fee”, refunded only when the project is ready to be connected up to the grid and forfeited if the project exits the queue early. Dell, Hughes and Lord Johnson were contacted for comment.