The English Town With 40 Data Centres is Demanding Its Share of the AI Boom

For decades, Slough’s industrial estate helped define Britain’s manufacturing economy. Today, its warehouses, factories and business parks house a different kind of infrastructure: the data centres that keep cloud computing, financial markets and artificial intelligence running.

The town west of London has become Europe’s largest data centre cluster, with more than 40 facilities and hundreds of megawatts of computing capacity. Now, as demand for AI infrastructure accelerates investment, local authorities want a bigger share of the wealth being generated by the industry on their doorstep.

Slough Borough Council has approached operators with proposals for community contributions ranging from £250,000 for immediate improvements to as much as £1 million annually for longer-term projects, according to reporting by the Financial Times on Tuesday. The proposals envisage companies and the council jointly identifying projects that could deliver visible benefits to residents.

The initiative exposes a growing tension at the heart of the AI boom: the infrastructure underpinning one of the world’s most valuable technology industries is concentrated in particular towns, but the profits, intellectual property and much of the economic value created by that infrastructure can accrue elsewhere.

For Slough, the question is no longer simply how to attract investment. It is how to convert its strategic importance to the digital economy into better public services, local employment, regeneration and a more tangible improvement in living standards.

The stakes extend beyond this town of roughly 160,000 people. Across Britain and Europe, governments are racing to secure computing capacity for AI, cloud services and digital sovereignty. But as data centres consume more electricity and compete for land and grid connections, their social licence to expand is becoming an increasingly important part of the investment equation.

Slough’s ascent was not the result of an AI investment strategy devised in advance. It was the product of geography, infrastructure and planning decisions that gradually made the town unusually attractive to data centre operators.

Its location about 32 kilometres west of London offers proximity to the capital’s financial markets, corporate customers and telecommunications networks, while the Slough Trading Estate provides industrial land and established infrastructure. Its connectivity to major fibre routes and access to electricity helped create a concentration of facilities that attracts more customers and investment.

That concentration has become self-reinforcing. Cloud providers and large businesses value proximity to network infrastructure and other data centres, while operators benefit from an ecosystem of suppliers, engineering expertise and established customers.

Planning arrangements have also helped. Slough Trading Estate operates under a Simplified Planning Zone framework, providing a more predictable route for qualifying developments than the conventional planning process. Property company SEGRO has said that the estate’s established cluster and planning framework helped it secure additional data centre development.

The scale is substantial. A 2026 report published by data centre operator Kao Data estimated that Slough hosted more than 675 megawatts of hyperscale data centre capacity, supported more than 14,000 jobs and generated over £30 million annually in business rates. Those figures reflect the industry’s assessment of its economic contribution and should not be confused with the number of people directly employed inside the facilities.

An earlier Slough planning assessment put the town’s capacity at about 379 megawatts across 29 facilities, illustrating how rapidly the cluster has expanded, although the two estimates use different reporting dates and potentially different definitions of capacity.

The industry provides construction work, electrical engineering, cooling systems, security, maintenance and specialist technical roles. It also supports businesses supplying equipment and services. Business rates give local government a recurring revenue stream, while investment in buildings and infrastructure can support the wider commercial property market.

But data centres are capital-intensive rather than labour-intensive businesses. A facility can require enormous spending on land, buildings, electrical equipment and cooling while employing relatively few people once construction ends.

That distinction matters for a town seeking broad-based economic renewal. A billion-pound infrastructure project does not necessarily create the same employment multiplier as a factory employing thousands of workers or a diverse business district populated by smaller companies.

The Centre for Cities think tank has highlighted the tension between data centres’ high economic output and relatively low employment. The result is a potential mismatch between the value of infrastructure recorded in economic statistics and the prosperity experienced by residents.

In Slough, that mismatch is becoming a political issue.

The scale of Slough’s digital infrastructure is also changing its relationship with the electricity system.

Government data cited by campaigners show that data centres consumed 65% of electricity used across the Slough local authority area in 2024. The figure illustrates how a single industry can become a dominant local energy consumer, although it does not establish how much additional capacity the facilities require from the grid at peak times.

That demand is arriving as Britain’s electricity system faces pressure from electrification, renewable energy integration and new industrial loads. Data centre developers increasingly compete not just for land and customers, but for access to grid connections that can take years to secure.

The constraint is particularly important for AI. Conventional cloud computing requires substantial electricity, but advanced AI workloads can require much higher concentrations of computing power, with thousands of specialised processors operating in close proximity. Those chips generate heat that must be removed through cooling systems, adding to the facility’s overall energy requirements.

The resulting infrastructure can be expensive and difficult to relocate. Once a cluster of data centres, fibre connections and customers has formed, operators have strong incentives to expand nearby, even as electricity availability becomes more constrained.

Across Europe, the supply-demand imbalance is already affecting the market. Property consultancy CBRE forecast that European data centre vacancy would fall to 6.5% by the end of 2026, after dropping below 10% for the first time in late 2024. It also expected more than 750 megawatts of new capacity to be added across Europe this year, while warning that grid bottlenecks were restricting supply.

Slough’s concentration of infrastructure is therefore both its competitive advantage and a source of vulnerability. Operators benefit from a location with established customers and connectivity, but the town bears a disproportionate share of the physical footprint and infrastructure demands.

This raises a difficult policy question: who should pay when a commercially valuable industry creates costs that are not fully captured by the private investment decisions that drive its growth?

Electricity prices, grid reinforcement, road improvements, water infrastructure and environmental monitoring all have economic costs. Some are borne directly by operators, others by network companies and consumers, and still others may fall to public authorities. The precise allocation varies by project and cannot be inferred from headline investment figures alone.

For residents, however, the issue is less abstract. They want to know whether further development will affect the availability of housing, the quality of their neighbourhoods and the public services they rely on.

The debate has become particularly contentious over the use of land that could otherwise accommodate homes.

In 2022, Slough Borough Council sold a former AkzoNobel site to data centre operator Equinix for about £144 million. The land had previously been earmarked for a mixed-use development that included up to 1,000 homes. Plans for a data centre campus subsequently advanced, with outline planning permission granted in 2026.

The transaction illustrates the trade-offs confronting a council under financial pressure. Selling land can generate substantial immediate revenue, while a data centre can produce business rates and other economic activity over time. Housing, by contrast, requires infrastructure and planning but can help address shortages and support a larger residential tax base.

The choices are not necessarily mutually exclusive across the town. But individual sites can force local authorities to decide which uses take priority, particularly where suitable land is scarce.

Slough’s financial circumstances make those decisions more consequential. The council effectively declared bankruptcy in 2021 after severe financial difficulties, and the subsequent sale of valuable land formed part of the wider debate over how the authority should manage its finances.

The new push for community contributions reflects the limits of relying on existing revenue streams alone. Even if data centres generate more than £30 million in annual business rates, that figure is not equivalent to money freely available for local services. Business rates are subject to the wider English local-government funding system, while operating costs, statutory obligations and other financial pressures compete for resources.

Nor is the industry’s reported employment contribution a measure of how many local residents secure permanent, well-paid jobs. Construction employment can be substantial but temporary, while operational roles often require specialised technical skills.

An industry-sponsored report cited by data centre publications estimated that the Slough sector supported more than 8,000 construction job-years between 2010 and 2025, alongside several hundred permanent operational jobs. A job-year represents one year of employment, rather than one individual employed continuously throughout the period.

That distinction matters for economic policy. A town may capture considerable investment without automatically building a deep local workforce capable of moving into higher-value digital industries.

A durable strategy would therefore need to connect infrastructure investment to technical education, apprenticeships, supplier development and pathways into engineering, energy management, cybersecurity and cloud computing. Otherwise, some of the most valuable employment opportunities may go to workers recruited from elsewhere.

Opposition to further construction is growing alongside the economic case for expansion.

A petition published on Slough Borough Council’s website called for a pause on new data centre developments until an independent assessment of their cumulative effects had been completed. By late October, it had attracted more than 1,000 signatures. The campaign raises concerns about electricity and water use, noise, backup generators, environmental effects and the loss of land previously intended for housing.

The demand for a cumulative assessment is significant. Individual planning applications are typically evaluated against the characteristics and expected impacts of a particular development. But where dozens of facilities operate within the same area, their combined effects may be more important than the impact of any single site.

Electricity consumption is one measurable indicator. Noise, traffic, air pollution from backup generators, water demand and the availability of land can also be assessed. The challenge is to distinguish impacts demonstrated by evidence from concerns that require further investigation.

Heat is another emerging issue. A Guardian report in June described residents’ concerns about unusually high temperatures around Slough’s data centre cluster and cited preliminary research into local heat-island effects. Researchers have found that data centres can contribute to local warming, but the size of the effect varies by facility and setting. Temperature differences around an industrial estate cannot, on their own, establish that data centres are responsible for all observed warming.

Water impacts likewise depend on cooling technology, climate, operating conditions and whether facilities use evaporative cooling or closed-loop systems. Electricity demand is not synonymous with water consumption, and environmental comparisons need to account for the full energy and cooling systems involved.

For residents, however, the lack of a comprehensive assessment is itself part of the problem. Without transparent information, it becomes harder to judge whether the benefits of additional development justify its cumulative costs.

The council’s proposed community payments could help address some immediate concerns, but they cannot substitute for environmental standards, infrastructure planning or public scrutiny of new projects.

Slough’s predicament is unfolding as the British government seeks to expand domestic computing capacity and attract investment in artificial intelligence.

Data centres are increasingly treated as strategic infrastructure rather than simply commercial property. They support financial transactions, government services, cloud software, communications and the computing workloads required to train and run AI models.

For governments, greater domestic capacity can improve access to computing resources and reduce dependence on infrastructure located abroad. But the location of a data centre does not necessarily determine where its profits are recorded, who owns the technology or where the most valuable AI services are developed.

A facility can host computing workloads for a multinational company whose intellectual property, management and shareholders are distributed across several countries. Local benefits therefore depend on the terms of investment, the tax structure, the supply chain and the skills available in the host economy.

This is why Slough’s effort to negotiate community contributions matters beyond Britain.

In the United States, Ireland and other European markets, local opposition and grid constraints have become obstacles to expanding data centre capacity. The industry is discovering that access to electricity, land and fibre is not enough: developers also need planning approval and sustained acceptance from communities living alongside the infrastructure.

A coalition of AI infrastructure companies, including Nvidia, Microsoft and Cisco, warned the British government in October that it had roughly a year to address public opposition before protests threatened construction. The group proposed a framework for sharing economic benefits with host communities.

That makes Slough’s initiative an early test of whether financial contributions can help maintain public support for the AI infrastructure boom.

But the design of any scheme will matter. If contributions are voluntary, residents may question whether companies will pay consistently. If payments are negotiated individually, communities may struggle to compare the benefits attached to different projects. And if contributions are small relative to the value of the infrastructure, they may do little to change public perceptions.

A more durable arrangement would make the relationship between private investment and public benefit transparent, with published commitments, clear spending rules, independently verified outcomes and a way for residents to influence priorities.

It would also distinguish between payments that compensate for specific impacts and investments that produce lasting economic benefits. Road improvements and noise mitigation may address immediate concerns; apprenticeships, technical training, local supplier contracts and investment in public spaces can help build longer-term value.

The scale of the opportunity is clear. If the council secured £1 million annually from each participating operator, the aggregate contribution could become material for community projects. But that is a hypothetical illustration, not a forecast: the proposed annual amount is not evidence that every operator will participate or that the council will receive such payments.

The council must also avoid treating contributions as a substitute for the tax system or as compensation for permitting development that would otherwise be inappropriate.

For operators, a predictable framework could offer a commercial advantage. Contributions that support skills, infrastructure and public amenities may help build trust, reduce opposition and make future investment more predictable. That could be preferable to repeated disputes that delay construction and increase project costs.

For the public sector, the challenge is to ensure that local benefits are additional, measurable and sustained. Announcing a training programme is not the same as demonstrating that residents obtained qualifications or jobs. Committing money to regeneration is not the same as showing that the town centre improved.

A rigorous framework would publish the number of local residents trained and employed, the value of contracts awarded to local suppliers, the revenue retained by the council, and the environmental performance of facilities. It would also disclose how much electricity and water the cluster uses, how those demands are expected to change and what infrastructure investment is required.

That information would allow residents to evaluate whether the industry is delivering against its promises and give operators a clearer basis for demonstrating their contribution.

Slough’s experience shows that the benefits of data centre investment should be considered before land is allocated, not only after a development has been approved. If housing, industrial activity and digital infrastructure compete for the same sites, local authorities need to evaluate their long-term economic and social value rather than focusing on immediate sale proceeds or projected business rates alone.

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