“Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!” wrote poet John Betjeman in 1937.
The scruffy trading estate west of London may only have got uglier since. But it’s definitely not somewhere you’d want to obliterate.
Slough is now Europe’s largest data hub and the second largest in the world.
Nearly every foreign exchange transaction passes through a single data centre here.
Others handle 95% of card purchases in the capital, not to mention the majority of data traffic on the global internet, from AI models to cat videos.
And that demand is growing – by around 35% a year according to industry data.
But the computers processing that data – especially the ones running AI models – are demanding increasing amounts of resources.
Electrical power to run the servers, but also water – and yet more power – to run the vast cooling systems needed to keep the online world running.
The latest analysis by the International Energy Agency (IEA) forecasts global power demand for data centres will double by 2026.
This week, the CEO of National Grid John Pettigrew warned electricity demand from data centres in the UK would increase six-fold in the next decade requiring “bold action” to adapt the power grid accordingly.
Data centres are packed with energy intensive hardware like servers
“It is a big part of our business,” says Bruce Owen, managing director of Equinix in the UK.
Of the 32 data centre companies in Slough, Equinix is largest.
A so-called “co-location” provider, it sites data centres closest to users and either provides servers for customers or rents space for their own.
Water chillers help cool the Equinix data centre
Like most of the industry, they have zero…
