Comedian Ricky Gervais was typically astringent in his Mortality television special last year when he addressed the dangers posed to the human race by artificial intelligence: “I’ll say this about AI: If it starts becoming a burden, switch it off ... like we did Nan.”
Authorities in Slough, where Gervais set his career-defining series The Office, want to do the opposite. The Berkshire town west of London plans to cash in on the global AI-fuelled boom in data centres, sparking a building sector gold rush to construct new facilities.
Slough was already home to the world’s second-largest cluster of data centres, drawn there over the past 20 years by fast-track council planning rules.
The town, close to Heathrow airport and the M4 motorway, also sits directly on top of the internet fibre optic cables that run across the Atlantic from the US, over Ireland and, from there, on to London via Wales and, eventually, mainland Europe.
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“Slough is strategically one of the most important areas in the world,” James Tyler, UK managing director of data centres giant Equinix told BBC earlier this year.
Yet a local backlash is brewing.
Residents worry about noise from the facilities and their demand for electricity and water, as well as fears that data centres may locally exacerbate heatwaves. They also complain about them crowding out new housing.
A petition before the council organised by local campaign group Slough Against Data Centres refers to the town’s status as a world hub for the facilities, second only to Ashburn, Virginia.
“What has Slough gained in return?” campaigners asked.
The Berkshire town’s centre this week seemed blighted by signs of urban decay such as shuttered shopping centres. Away from the depressed centre, however, there was fresh development. Data centres have brought 14,000 jobs. Yet some locals are unhappy.
Slough, the campaigners said, “should not be an experiment” for the global AI boom.
It is a tune increasingly being heard across Britain, where the Labour government, hungry for investment to spur economic growth, plans to triple data centre output by 2030. It has designated them “critical national infrastructure” to bypass planning rules.
Opposition is emerging to new data centres in London, where housing secretary Angela Rayner is under fire for recently waving one through one near the Bengali culture hub Brick Lane, and elsewhere in England as development radiates out from Slough into rural shires.
There is also opposition brewing in Wales and, most recently, Scotland, where the parliament in Holyrood this month voted to delay for at least a year while planning rules are reviewed several so-called “hyperscale” data centres designed to “train” new AI.
“We can all at least take a breath now,” said Katherine Jones, a campaigner against big data centres in rural Scotland, as she welcomed the pause decision there.
There is no sign yet, however, of any pause in Slough, where this week data centre development appeared to be full steam ahead.
The town is probably better known as an anti-cultural metaphor, the punchline of a thousand jokes about supposed dreariness in suburban Britain.
Gervais’s cringey David Brent character in The Office worked at boring paper company Wernham Hogg. The building on the Slough Trading Estate (STE) that was the site of the fictional company’s headquarters has since been knocked down, replaced with a shiny new Premier Inn hotel. The only evidence of Brent this week was a bust of the character in the hotel’s lobby, unveiled this summer for the 25th anniversary of The Office.
All around Gervais’s nondescript former stomping ground, however, was evidence of Slough’s AI-fuelled data centre boom. The trading estate is the hotspot. Building cranes are everywhere.
The hotel sits off Buckingham Avenue, which is Europe’s “data centre alley”. Along this road which is the backbone of the STE’s streets, as well as streets branching off to the north and south, sit scores of huge data centres servicing tech giants such as Amazon and Google.
There are at least 500 data centres in Britain. Almost one in 10 are in Slough Trading Estate, which is owned by a stock market-listed company that boasts of a £200 million (€232 million) rental bounty coming over the next few years.
One industry estimate suggested that the business rates charged on STE’s data centres alone generate almost 10 per cent of the council’s services budget.
At the western edge of the trading estate and Buckingham Avenue are huge facilities such as Equinix’s LD6 and LD4, which handles data for much of London and Europe’s banking transaction and trading traffic.
Nearby, Irish-founded construction giant Laing O’Rourke is building LD14. It is part of Equinix’s £3.9 billion UK investment pipeline.
Other big facilities dotted around Buckingham Avenue include those owned and being built by Iron Mountain. Its LON-1 facility was originally used to service Credit Suisse bank, but is now used by many other institutions. Nearby LON-2 is designed for cloud computing while LON-3 is being built for AI machine learning.
All of the facilities observed by The Irish Times this week were heavily guarded behind high fences and with little branding or outside signage. Data centre developers appear sensitive to the public debate around the power- and water-hungry facilities, which place strain on national infrastructure.
There is a low-level, constant hum easily detectable all along Buckingham Avenue, which is barely a mile from the town centre. Residents have complained about it in messages to the council. The noise comes from the fans cooling the slews of data centre computers and the electric transformers channelling the facilities’ power.
Whatever local resentment was brewing in Slough over data centres broke cover this year with two new schemes proposed for outside the trading estate boundaries with its special development zone rules.
Equinix received outline permission for a huge new data centre at an old paint factory near the hospital that was once slated for 1,000 new homes. Meanwhile, Microsoft wants to build a large centre near Langley train station on a site also once meant to include housing.
Local resident Ambily Banerjee told local media she set up a WhatsApp group in which residents aired opposition to the Microsoft centre, and things grew from there.
“As word spread, we attracted more residents who were keen to volunteer their time to build a grassroots, resident-led campaign,” she said in one report.
Slough Against Data Centres was born. It is calling for planners to institute a Scottish-style pause on new data centre developments. By Friday, it had garnered half the 1,500 local signatures necessary to force a formal council debate.
As well as concerns over power and water, residents are worried about aggravating the local effects of climate change.
“Research has suggested clusters of data centres can contribute to an urban heat island effect,” they said, claiming that nearby temperatures can increase by as much as 9 degrees.
“The long-term effects of hosting one of the world’s largest concentrations of data centres remain poorly understood. With life expectancy of Slough residents already lower than the national average, we cannot afford to further risk our health and quality of life.”
For the UK government, however, money talks – for now.
Rayner’s deputy minister, Matthew Pennycook, earlier this year cited “the need to support economic growth and productivity” when waving through permission for one Slough data centre proposed for a green belt site.
Economic arguments were also raised by the UK government this summer when it gave the green light to the controversial data centre-led scheme at London’s Brick Lane. Locals are furious the mixed-use project includes just six affordable homes. There are up to 30,000 on the local council’s housing waiting list.
From the Scottish highlands to Wales, from Leeds to now the mega-hub of Slough, scrutiny of intensive data centre development is increasing across Britain.
