Questions Before ConcreteData centres in England and Wales
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The issues · Resilience and concentration

Too much in too few places?

When a few companies and a handful of places carry much of a country's digital life, one failure can reach a long way, and the local pressure on water and power piles up.

Why it matters

Clusters of data centres compete for the same water and the same grid. Each may look acceptable alone; together they may not.

Other countries have had to pause new data centres when demand outran supply.

Key points

  • Slough alone used 29% of Great Britain's data-centre electricity in 2024, and data centres take 65% of Slough's grid electricity.[1]
  • In Ireland, data centres went from 5% to about 22% of national electricity demand in under a decade, leading to a moratorium.[2]
  • Ofgem has warned that the network cannot connect all the data centres now asking.[3]
  • Proposals in Wales could add nearly ten times the data-centre capacity now operating.[3]

Questions you can ask

Drafted in full so you can copy, adapt and send them. See the questions tracker for all of them, with a downloadable version.

Ask: Kanishka Narayan MP, Minister for Artificial Intelligence (Cabinet Office and Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade)

“Does increasing concentration of the UK's digital infrastructure among a small number of cloud providers and locations create strategic risks, and has the Government assessed them as part of designating data infrastructure as Critical National Infrastructure?”

Follow-up: Not yet asked, so far as we know.

What you can do

  • Find the application on your council's planning website, and check what the documents say on this issue, or whether they are silent. See Start here.
  • Send the questions on this page in writing and keep copies.
  • If information is missing, ask for it through WhatDoTheyKnow.
  • Ask your town or community council to raise the issue in its response.
  • List your group in the campaigns directory so others can find you.

Read this issue in depth

Sources

  1. Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, Data Centre Electricity Consumption in Great Britain, 2020–2024 (Official Statistics in Development, June 2026). https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6a3e9f25da47783d87723bf2/Data_centre_electricity_consumption_in_Great_Britain__2020_to_2024.pdf
  2. Pinsent Masons, 'New Irish Data Centres Must Generate Power Back into National Grid, Rules Regulator', reporting the Commission for Regulation of Utilities' final policy decision of December 2025. https://www.pinsentmasons.com/out-law/news/irish-data-centres-power-national-grid-regulator
  3. Fuse Energy, analysis of electricity demand from proposed Welsh data centres and the South Wales AI Growth Zone, citing Ofgem's warning that the current network cannot accommodate all proposed data-centre grid connections (2026). https://www.fuseenergy.com/news/welsh-data-centre