New data centres planned

The number of data centres in the UK is set to increase rapidly. Construction researchers Barbour ABI analysed planning documents and identified almost 100 new centres in the works, most to be built within the next five years. The value of the projects would be upwards of £36 billion. The UK currently has an estimated 477 data centres.

More than half the centres will be built around London and neighbouring counties. Nine are planned in Wales, one in Scotland, and five in Greater Manchester. Most of them will be funded by Google, Microsoft and Amazon, but there is generally a high level of secrecy in the industry.

The Competition and Markets Authority recently determined that “competition is not working well” in the Cloud services market.

Data centres use huge amounts of power and water to run; each data centre is equivalent to thousands of homes being added to the network. For example, Thames Water has warned that it has identified 108 “hyper or large” data centres that would drive up demand in the “water-stressed region” of London and the South East.

The government has announced AI Growth Zones as part of a wider ambition to increase the UK’s domestic compute capacity by 20 times over by 2030. AI Growth Zones will be sites in de-industrialised areas where the government will accelerate the planning permission for data centres and associated infrastructure.