The UK government has unveiled a bold new strategy to position the country as a global leader in artificial intelligence, using one of the country’s most abundant naturally occurring resources – the tears of English football fans.

“We looked at wind, we looked at solar, and honestly neither compares to the sheer output of forty million people watching England give up a 1-0 lead to Argentina,” a spokesperson for the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology said. “Unlike solar power, it works at night. Unlike wind, it doesn’t depend on weather, and unlike traditional energy sources, it replenishes itself every two years like clockwork”.

Engineers say the tears will be collected via a network of specially designed pint glasses installed in pubs nationwide, before being piped to processing plants where the tears will be filtered, distilled and reduced to a coolant-grade liquid capable of chilling even the most demanding GPU cluster.

“Just one goal in the 92nd minute can cool a mid-sized server farm for up to six months,” one engineer familiar with the project said.

Not everyone is convinced, however. Critics have raised concerns about long-term sustainability, noting that England’s tendency to occasionally, unexpectedly do quite well at a tournament could leave the national grid dangerously exposed.

“If we ever actually won something, the whole system would collapse overnight,” energy analyst Priya Chandra warned. “We simply don’t have a backup coolant. There’s been talk of stockpiling disappointment from the men’s cricket team, but that’s not going to last forever”.