What A Hyperscaler Wants From UK Data Centres

Power and planning.

Those are the key areas where the UK needs to improve to attract the data centre occupiers that are driving the growth of artificial intelligence and the global economy, according to one of the world’s largest hyperscalers. 

“Those are the fundamentals that you require. But the big challenge we're facing in the UK now, particularly in and around London, is incredibly long power connection timelines,” Google UK Lead for Energy and Location Strategy Jess Simmonds told an audience of more than 250 people at Bisnow’s UK Data Centre Investment and Development Conference.

Google in September opened an £800M data centre in Waltham Cross, north of London, its first standalone UK data centre. The power capacity of the 667K SF site has not been precisely disclosed, but Google said it had struck a 100-megawatt power purchase agreement with Engie's Moray West offshore wind farm in Scotland for the scheme.

Right now, Google has around six large-scale, publicly disclosed data centre buildings or campuses in Europe in operation or under construction, with facilities in countries including Denmark, the Netherlands and Ireland. 

That compares with as many as 15 major developments in the U.S. 

As well as the speed at which connections to the grid could be achieved, Simmonds said another challenge the UK faces in attracting data centre occupiers is the cost of electricity — 35% higher than in Germany, which has one of Europe’s highest energy prices. 

Earlier this year, OpenAI said it was pausing its plans for a Stargate data centre in the UK because of the cost of energy and excessive regulation. 

Another speaker at the event, BGO Data Centres CEO Dave Newitt, said the UK needs to change its energy pricing policy, whereby electricity costs are the same no matter where you are in the country. 

Decentralising pricing would allow data centres to locate next to abundant sources of renewable energy in areas like Scotland or the north east, allowing those areas to compete with regions like the Nordics and Spain, currently popular with hyperscale data centre users because of cheap and plentiful electricity. 

Simmonds said opportunities to build data centres in areas like Wales and the north east had crossed her desk of late, driven by the designation of parts of these areas as government AI growth zones. Such areas are good locations for data centre uses that don’t necessarily need to be near their end user, such as AI training, she said. 

London will always remain a hub for data centres in the UK because it is the location of so many users, be they financial services or tech firms or individual consumers, panelists said. 

When it comes to power, Google is looking at colocating its own power generation facilities on data centre sites, including renewables, Simmonds said. But that is highly unlikely to provide all of the energy a data centre requires.

“The main thing that has to be considered is reliability,” she said. “Renewable products absolutely have to be part of the development opportunity, but the reliability in terms of serving the data centre is critical. That’s where grid connection, in the UK at least, is where you're going to get the most reliability.”

She added that sites where there is the possibility to use heat emitted from data centres to create energy for local communities are of interest to the company. 

In terms of the type of scheme Google will consider, Simmonds said powered shells — where Google can buy or lease a building with all of the outer fabric and power connection it needs and simply come in and add the computing and technology infrastructure it needs — represent an interesting opportunity. 

Then, as always, there’s planning. The UK planning system needs to be tweaked to make major infrastructure projects like data centres easier to deliver, Simmonds said. 

“We need to see planning reforms to the National Planning Policy Framework to enable scalable sites to actually come forward with development,” she said. 

“Data centres are tricky. There are some authorities that get it, and it's just inconsistent. And it's getting consistency across the board.”