Britain’s Brewing Battle Over Data Centers

As mayor of Newham, Rokhsana Fiaz has plenty of problems to reckon with. Her London borough is wrestling with entrenched poverty and the capital’s highest rate of residents stuck in temporary housing. But midway through her second term, Fiaz has a new plan to turn things around. She believes that AI could provide a multimillion-pound boost to economic growth, and she’s campaigning for Newham to get a share. “We want to be able to seize the opportunities of the data economy,” she says, “and data centers are a core part of that.”
Fiaz’s support for the server farms reflects the enthusiasm of a new generation of Labour politicians expecting to be voted into power in the UK election later this week. After 14 years of center-right Conservative rule, polls predict that voters will endorse the center-left Labour Party’s pledges to kick-start economic growth and grasp the potential of AI—in part by making it easier to build more data centers across the country.
Last month, Newham approved the nation’s latest data center, on a patch of industrial land overlooking the River Thames. The plan was welcomed by some residents, who had fiercely campaigned against a new lorry depot destined for the same site. “Everyone breathed a sigh of relief,” says Sam Parsons of the Royal Wharf Residents Association, which represents 1,600 people who live in a nearby housing development. Personally, however, Parsons is still worried—mostly about the noise the data center could make once building-work has finished. “There’s a place in America where residents had a terrible time with this humming sound,” he says, referring to reports out of Virginia last year. On a Thursday morning in Newham, the handful of people that spoke to WIRED as they were passing London City Hall near to the data center site said they did not know about the plans. Most local residents seemed disinterested in how the 210-megawatt infrastructure would impact the already hugely built-up area, but one resident, Paul, who refused to give a surname, summed up the general sentiment: “We have zero need for it,” he says.
If Labour does get elected to power this week, ministers will have to convince people across the UK, already Europe’s biggest market for data centers, why they need even more and decide where to put them.
Discontent is brewing across the country, with opposition particularly strong in areas known as the “green belt,” swaths of countryside designated to prevent urban sprawl. Labour is well-aware the party’s plan to make it easier to build data centers risks causing conflict between developers and locals, according to two people with knowledge of internal party discussions. Residents in Amsterdam, Frankfurt, and Dublin have clashed with data center developers, complaining of the buildings’ insatiable appetite for power and water. All three cities have since imposed restrictions on new developments.
“The question for national politicians, rather than poor little us, is: What does the country value most?” says Jane Griffin, spokesperson for the Colne Valley Regional Park, a stretch of farmland, woodland and lakes on the outskirts of London where there have been six applications to build new data centers. “Green spaces with trees and lakes? Or do we want a massive, great data center?”
The British data center market is deeply secretive—there is no official record of how many there are in the UK. Many companies reason that releasing the locations of their server farms would expose them to potential attacks that could hamper critical industries. Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta all declined WIRED’s request to comment on the number of data centers they used or operated inside the country. There is also an array of smaller, more anonymous firms operating these sites. “Everyone just wants to hide and just get on with their business,” says Spencer Lamb, chief operating officer of Kao Data, who says his company has four UK data centers either in operation or still being built.
Estimates of the number of data centers range from around 300 to over 500, with the majority clustered around London. What is widely understood is that the amount of power the sector consumes is set to explode as AI turbocharges demand. Right now, data centers are estimated to account for 1.4 percent of the country’s total consumer electricity demand, according to the National Grid. Over the next decade, power demands are expected to jump 500 percent.
The location of those new data centers will be key, says Lamb. He’s hoping Labour’s strategy can prevent a repeat of what happened in Amsterdam, where residents complained about data centers becoming concentrated in a small area. “If these were spread across each country, it wouldn’t be causing pain and agony for those people in a specific location,” he says. “I can remember [when] each town and city had an industrial estate within it. It makes sense now that we should be putting these AI factories [data centers] into the equivalent.”
Yet under a Conservative government, developers have rushed to anywhere there is available power, often running into community resistance when they arrive. “Right now, it’s hard to get access to both land and power planning permission in order to build,” says Bruce Owen, managing director for Equinix UK, global data center provider. “The process is very lengthy and cumbersome.”
Seamus Dunne, managing director of UK and Ireland at Digital Realty, another global data center provider, agrees. “Changing rules and regulations to speed things up can only be good,” Dunne says.
Earlier this year, a data center project the size of 15 American football fields proposed by investment company Greystoke was rejected after local officials in the region of Hertfordshire said it would be inappropriate on greenbelt land. Last week, officials in neighboring Buckinghamshire shot down amended plans for another Greystoke data center, following concerns raised by the local Conservative politician Joy Morrissey that the data center would jeopardize the local green spaces.
Whereas Conservative politicians have been outspoken in their opposition to the data centers imposing on the countryside, Labour have already suggested the party will encourage more building on what they call “lower quality” greenbelt land. The party declined to answer WIRED’s questions about whether those plans would include data centers. But MP Peter Kyle, the politician expected to become the UK’s next technology minister, called the rejection of the Buckinghamshire data center on the greenbelt “economic vandalism.” “Labour will be different,” he said in a speech in June. “We will update national planning policy to reflect the importance of data centers.”
If they win the election, the Labour Party is planning to treat data center projects as “nationally significant infrastructure” like wind farms or airports, says Neil Ross, associate policy director at industry group TechUK, who has been involved in talks with the party. That would give ministers the ability to overrule local officials who attempt to block data centers from being built. According to Ross, this would only be applied to a handful of very large projects. “They definitely will not be overruling councils for the majority of cases.”
Still, Labour faces a battle ahead. The data center market is about to see its biggest growth in history to meet AI companies’ “stratospheric” demand, according to Kevin Restivo, head of data center research at real estate consultancy CBRE, which projects data center capacity in London alone will jump 17 percent this year. Yet people still don’t really understand why we need data centers for “the cloud” to function.
The cloud is “a metaphor that’s worked quite well, to say the least,” he says, “so much so that people don’t understand the infrastructure involved.”