‘Slough is like an experiment’: Europe’s largest datacentre hub leaves town sweltering
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- Slough, located 10 miles west of Heathrow, hosts an estimated 30-40 huge datacentre facilities on a central campus, operated by companies including Equinix and Digital Realty for clients such as Amazon, Google, Oracle and Microsoft.
- Cambridge researchers found in a preprint that datacentres create a heat island effect raising nearby temperatures by an average of 2°C and as much as 9°C, based on decades of satellite data from sites in Brazil, Spain and elsewhere.
- Andrea Marinoni, a Cambridge associate professor and paper co-author, called Slough "almost like an experiment" because its roughly 1 gigawatt of capacity is about ten times the 100-megawatt scale of the facilities his team studied.
- Weather stations closest to the Slough tech park recorded 36.7°C and 36.5°C this week, while stations further from the park hit 36.2°C and 34.7°C — a gap that held throughout the week.
- Local resident Matt recalled that during the 2022 UK heatwave, a Slough car park reached 45°C while nearby Windsor was 39°C.
- The UK government has proposed using waste heat from datacentres to warm thousands of homes, positioning the same infrastructure blamed for the heat as a potential heating source.
- Chaiiwala manager Nabeel Nawaz estimates datacentres account for only 10-15% of the local temperature increase, saying most residents blame climate change rather than the facilities.
Why it matters: Slough's ~1GW cluster is roughly ten times the scale of facilities measured in the only available global heat-island study, so the 2-9°C figure likely understates what residents actually feel — and the same heat-generating infrastructure is now the UK's proposed solution for warming homes.
