Britain’s Brewing Battle Over Data Centers

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.”