“Artificial intelligence (AI) will be unleashed across the UK to deliver a decade of national renewal” , has announced the UK government. Data centres, the energy-hungry, water-guzzling facilities powering AI, have sprung up at an unprecedented pace across the country. The UK now ranks third globally for data centres, behind only the US and Germany.
Data centres are believed to be so pivotal to the UK’s future that they have been designated as critical national infrastructure, placing them in the same category as hospitals and railways. Yet 67% of Britons don’t know what a data centre is. Unlike traditional civic infrastructure, these facilities operated by big tech expand with minimal public consultation and weak environmental safeguards. “We are investing in Britain’s future by cutting the red tape that holds businesses back” , Prime Minister Keir Starmer recently tweeted, highlighting his cabinet’s deregulatory approach. But as “red tape” is removed and demand for AI arises, so do questions about water depletion, grid strain, fossil fuel reliance, and the frontline communities that bear these costs.
The unquenchable thirst of data centres
Typically rented by tech companies, data centres are large warehouses housing computer servers which store, process, or distribute large volumes of data. This data includes everything from emails and NHS patient records to YouTube videos and Instagram photos—even this very article may have passed through a data centre to reach your screen.
Data centres require a lot of electricity to operate. The average data centre consumes relatively moderate amounts of power, with an electricity demand ranging from 1 to 10 megawatts (MW). That’s roughly the power demand of a hospital complex or a large stadium. However, due to the AI boom, data centre electricity demand has been growing over the past few years. The power requirement of sites known as ‘hyperscale’ data centres exceeds 100 MW, equivalent to the annual usage of 100,000 households. Shockingly, new centres under development are at the gigawatt (GW) scale (1 GW = 1,000 MW), which corresponds to the annual electricity consumption of millions of households. In 2024, data centres accounted for about 1.5% of global electricity demand, or 415 terawatt-hours (TWh), according to a report by the International Energy Agency (IEA). This figure is projected to double by 2030 due to AI’s increasing processing needs, reaching 945 TWh, which exceeds Japan’s annual electricity consumption.
The water demand of data centres mirrors their electricity usage. Because servers generate immense quantities of heat, they require cooling to prevent overheating and potential damage. Sourced from surface and underground aquifers, water is pumped in through pipes in and around the servers, creating a cooling effect. Water is also used to produce the electricity powering the facility, with more water used when the energy source is fossil fuels compared to renewables. A medium-sized data centre can consume over 400 million litres per year, equivalent to the annual water usage of a thousand households. For larger data centres, this can reach 7 billion litres per year, the usage of a town of 10,000 to 50,000 people. As the AI rush intensifies, similarly to electricity usage, data centre water demand grows in lockstep, with large data centres “drinking up” huge amounts of water—in some cases, over 25% of community water reservoirs.
In the future, tech companies are aiming to use cleaner sources of energy to fuel data centres, deploying new nuclear and geothermal technologies. But today, these centres have large, and often underreported, carbon footprints due to their high resource consumption and dependency on fossil fuels. The IEA found that fossil fuels currently provide nearly 60% of power to data centres, releasing substantial amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Although solar and wind are sustainable alternatives and presently meet 27% of electricity demand, their intermittency requires battery storage or fossil fuel backup to ensure 24/7 operations.
These massive energy and water demands aren’t just abstractions. Rather, they manifest as real pressures on communities forced to host these facilities. As of August 2025, there were an estimated 477 data centres dotted around the UK, with dense clusters in Greater London, South Wales, Greater Manchester, and North East England.
Britain’s ageing infrastructure meets the data centre boom
The rollout of data centres has sparked the ire of frontline communities across the country, notably in Potters Bar, where the largest cloud and AI data centre in Europe is being built. Residents are concerned about the facility’s environmental and health impacts on the green commuter town—asthma already mars the community due to its proximity to the M25. Locals have criticised the council’s and developers’ lack of transparency and are anxious about the data centre’s potential strain on their electricity and water grids.
British electricity grids are antiquated, and with new data centres planned in pre-existing clusters, they risk being dangerously overwhelmed. This begs the question: what will be cut off first in the event of a power outage—Amazon’s cloud or your heating? Moreover, the construction rush may result in soaring electricity prices in a country plagued by high utility bills, the highest in Europe. For Stuart George, CEO of Welsh energy company Green GEN Cymru, the rollout had “the possibility of exacerbating that issue [high utility bills] if it isn’t counterbalanced by rapid deployment of low-cost generation and grid infrastructure” . This price surge has already been observed in the US, where the price of wholesale electricity increased by 267% over five years in areas near data centres.
New data centres may further strain public water supplies in dry parts of the country, as is the case for Spain and parts of the US, including Arizona, Wyoming, and Nebraska. Today, British data centres powering AI workloads are using inordinate amounts of public water—in Scotland, they are drawing enough to fill 27 million half-litre bottles a year. The UK is vulnerable to climate breakdown and has experienced droughts in recent times, with the South particularly at risk of water shortages. Because data centres are not obligated to share their water consumption data, combined with the AI boom, the Environment Agency is unable to forecast further water shortfalls in England in the coming decades.
Data centre constructions flout existing environmental impact assessments. There is a “total lack of transparency and accountability” regarding existing UK data centres and their effects on local ecologies, said Donald Campbell, Director of Advocacy at the non-profit Foxglove. Experts are calling for developers to publish metrics on their resource consumption and carbon emissions. James Bamborough, Sustainability and Net Zero Policy Manager at the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), declared: “Cost cannot only be quantified in terms of financial return as the cost to the environment and the impact that climate change has on health must also be considered” .
This construction rush may derail the UK’s net zero plans, with new projects like the Google data centre in Essex emitting more than half a million tons of carbon dioxide annually, equivalent to about 500 short-haul flights a week. While the UK’s renewable capacity is growing, it is not yet enough to cover the electrification of transport and heating, in addition to the high demand from data centres. If renewable energy deployment falls behind, this demand risks being met by fossil fuels. This is already happening: in August, the FT found that developers are connecting data centres to the UK’s main gas pipelines.
The fight for data centre transparency and regulations
The government remains undeterred despite mounting concerns about AI’s sustainability in an era of climate change. To stay in the global AI race, another 100 data centres will be built nationally over the next few years. Some of these facilities have been commissioned by tech giants such as Microsoft, which announced a £22 billion investment in the UK’s AI sector in September 2025.
In response, communities across the country are fighting back. In Iver, residents have gone a step further than in Potters Bar: they are legally challenging the government over the construction of a hyperscale data centre. In their pre-action protocol letter, activists contend that the government failed to assess the project’s environmental impacts and potential stress on the area’s electricity and water grids. They join a global pushback against data centres, with cities such as Tucson, Arizona and St. Louis, Missouri in the US resisting their rollout.
These campaigns mark a turning point. For decades, data centres grew quietly in industrial parks, largely invisible to the public. But as they expand, always hungrier for more resources, that invisibility dissipates. Communities are finally demanding a say in these construction projects that will permanently reshape their neighbourhoods. Whether the government will pause this construction frenzy to address these concerns remains to be seen. For now, the battle is moving from social media and town halls to courtrooms, and residents show no signs of backing down.
