What happened in this Energy story?

Writing from Slough — home to western Europe's densest datacentre cluster — Guardian columnist John Harris examines how AI-driven compute is straining UK water and energy supplies, with residents reporting heat and noise, as government plans to triple capacity by 2030 despite forecasts that exclude datacentre water use.

What is a key fact in this story? (1)

**Slough Trading Estate** hosts as many as 40 datacentres — the densest cluster in western Europe — and local residents told Harris they have noticed more heat and a constant whirring since new facilities opened nearby.

What is a key fact in this story? (2)

A **Cambridge University** preprint found datacentres can create heat-island effects, raising local temperatures by an average of 2C and as much as 9C; the estate's corporate owners said they had "not seen conclusive evidence" of the link.

As AI guzzles water and energy, we are already facing a choice: datacentres or homes? | John Harris — SkimNews

By The Guardian Environment · Summarized & edited by Kapil Samant · 2026-08-09

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Slough Trading Estate hosts as many as 40 datacentres — the densest cluster in western Europe — and local residents told Harris they have noticed more heat and a constant whirring since new facilities opened nearby.
A Cambridge University preprint found datacentres can create heat-island effects, raising local temperatures by an average of 2C and as much as 9C; the estate's corporate owners said they had "not seen conclusive evidence" of the link.
Water UK said the government's existing water forecasts are "fatally flawed" and "explicitly exclude" datacentres, which can use up to 5 million gallons of water per day — equivalent to the consumption of up to 50,000 people.
New York became the first US state to impose a one-year pause on new hyperscale datacentres, and Texas's Republican governor ordered new centres kept off the state power grid pending regulator review of their water and energy use.
Ofgem said 100 planned UK centres aim to run their own dedicated gas turbines, while Whitehall's official target is to triple the UK's datacentre count by 2030 and has classified them as critical national infrastructure.
A December London Assembly report found datacentre electricity demand had stalled housebuilding in the capital; housing secretary Angela Rayner approved a Truman Brewery redevelopment that includes a datacentre and only 44 homes, down from the 350 dwellings the local council had backed.

Why it matters: The UK is formally targeting a tripling of datacentre capacity by 2030 while government water forecasts, per Water UK, "explicitly exclude" datacentre consumption of up to 5 million gallons per day — a planning blind spot that, combined with documented housebuilding stalls in London and drought-era hosepipe bans, turns "homes or servers" from rhetoric into a concrete resource-allocation choice ministers have not yet made.