Take data centres UK-wide and build alongside AI Growth Zones, Government told

Spencer Lamb, Chief Commercial Officer with Kao Data Centre in Harlow, says the current strategy of cramming all data centre plans into a London-South East footprint is failing to grasp the opportunity presented by the sector.

They should be developed more widely and set alongside AI growth zones, he argues.

Lamb reveals that more than 80 per cent of the UK’s data centres are located in and around London - more specifically Slough and West London.

For an industry centred around risk management, the irony is that the UK’s data centre ‘eggs’ are all in one basket, which Lamb says makes little sense from a resilience point of view, let alone the security of our new ‘critical national infrastructure’.

The issue is also starving the rest of the UK of much-needed economic investment and high tech development, he argues.

Lamb says the UK “needs to ditch the London-centric view and follow our neighbours France (Paris, Marseille and Lyon) and Germany (Frankfurt, Berlin, Cologne and Munich) and Spain (Madrid, Zaragoza and Barcelona) in rapidly diversifying our data centre map.”

He adds that the Government’s own AI Opportunities Action Plan correctly identifies the need for ‘AI Growth Zones’ (AIGZs), streamlining planning and accelerating the provision of green energy to ensure that the AI data centre market is well placed to secure investment.

Lamb contends: “Many former industrial heartlands of the UK – South Wales, the Midlands, Greater Manchester and the North East - now have under-utilised energy grids, prime brownfield land ready to develop, and a readily available workforce.

“With connectivity improving across the UK and hollow-core fibre reducing latency requirements, UK regions have never been in a better position to benefit from the data centre industry’s boom by providing locations for AIGZs.

“The data centre industry has already delivered £4.5 billion in Gross Value Added to the UK economy and is on track to deliver 10 times that amount over the next decade. Yet figures like those are, to some extent, abstract. In practical, boots-on-the- ground terms, each and every large data centre built in the UK requires an army of professionals - from architects, lawyers, and accountants to engineers, construction workers and operators.

“The build alone can employ upwards of a thousand individuals; over the 25-year lifespan of the centre, hundreds more job opportunities are created in the wider tech ecosystem through customers, suppliers and partners.

“As many as nearly 60,000 jobs are expected to be created by data centres within the next decade alone.

For areas which have suffered the loss of manufacturing and other heavy industries, data centres can provide good high net-worth, future proof employment opportunities.

“Any way you cut it, pooling the nation’s data centres in the south east, where space is already at a premium, makes little sense. If the Government is looking for an easy win on economic regeneration in stagnant areas, one of the best moves it could make would be to designate data centre planning zones alongside AI Growth Zones across the UK.”

Lamb says that encouraging data centres to be developed outside of the Slough and west London ‘bubble’ more easily would draw substantial amounts of private investment and high-net worth jobs into the areas that most need them, and provide greater resilience in the data centre industry as a whole.