Locating data centres

As a rule of thumb, the factors of key importance when deciding where to locate a new data centre are:

• Low latency and proximity to users: For applications requiring high speed (e.g., banking, real-time trading), data centres must be close to customers, which drives the concentration in London and other regional business hubs.
  
  
• Power availability and access: Data centres require immense power (as of 2026, 6% of UK electricity is consumed by data centres). Proximity to high-voltage grid connections is crucial.
  
  
• Fibre connectivity: High-density, reliable connectivity to multiple network providers is essential to ensure 24/7 "always-on" availability.
  
  
• Cost and availability of land: As London sites fill up, new developments are moving to areas with lower land costs, such as South Wales and the North East, which can accommodate large-scale facilities.
  
  
• Sustainable energy access: Regional locations, particularly in Scotland, are favoured for their access to renewable energy (wind and hydro).
  
  
• Government initiatives: New "AI Growth Zones" (in Cobalt Park/Blyth, Anglesey/Gwynedd, South Wales in the corridor between Newport and Bridgend, Culham in Oxfordshire, and Lanarkshire in Scotland) aim to incentivize development by offering streamlined planning and potentially cheaper electricity to encourage regional growth.

Hyperscalers are the largest cloud computing companies who build and operate data centres at unprecedented scale. The main players in the UK are Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Meta and Oracle Cloud.  They tend to select the locations for their data centres as follows:

• Scale requirements – they require very large sites, of 50-200+ acres.
  
  
• Power capacity – they require significant capacity from the national grid, direct relationships with energy providers and sometimes their own substations.
  
  
• Renewable energy commitments- all major hyperscalers have net zero pledges, so alternative power sources are increasingly important.
  
  
• They usually plan for long-term expansion over 10-20 years so will look for plots which can offer this flexibility;
  
  
• The location of their sites are often kept deliberately secret for security reasons.
  
  
• They often prefer multiple sites in a region (known as availability zones) rather than a single location, which consist of one or more isolated, physically separate data centers within a single geographic region. Each zone features independent power, cooling, and networking to ensure that failures in one zone do not affect others.

Colocation providers own and operate the physical building and infrastructure but rent out space, power and connectivity to multiple customers who bring their own servers and equipment.  The major operators in the UK include; Equinix, Virtus, CyrusOne, Digital Realty, Telehouse, Colt DCS and Pulsant.  Their key criteria for a location include:

·       Customer proximity – they must be close to their target customers, for example financial services sector demand drives the concentration of such centres in London.  Regional providers follow business cluster patterns

·       Connectivity – they need access to multiple network providers and proximity to internet exchanges is critical

·       Power – they typically need 10-100 megawatts per facility, and must secure long-term power purchase agreements.  Like the hyperscalers, they are increasingly focused on renewable energy sourcing.

·       Clustering – locating near competitors can be beneficial due to shared infrastructure.  Slough is a good example where multiple operators co-locate near each other to create an ecosystem of connectivity and services.

Large government departments operate their own dedicated facilities, for example some individual NHS trusts own significant data infrastructure across the country notwithstanding that the central NHS bodies have moved to hybrid cloud models. Some government departments own secure data centre hubs, such as Cheltenham's GCHQ hub. These have different security requirements to commercial operators, with air-gapped systems and extreme physical security. The Ministry of Defence operates its own secure data infrastructure facilities at various military installations across the UK although they are increasingly using private cloud solutions. Their criteria for locations include:

• Security requirements – locations must meet government security classifications and are therefore often located away from flight paths and must have robust physical security perimeters, in compliance with UK government security standards;
  
  
• Power – they need multiple redundant connections and power supplies; and
  
  
• Data sovereignty is critical – it is critical that the data stays in the UK.

Some large UK businesses such as banks and retailers still operate their own private data centres.  However, there is a shift away from these enterprise data centres, with many companies consolidating from multiple small rooms to fewer larger facilities, cloud migration reducing the need for private infrastructure, and outsourcing to colocation providers becoming increasingly common.

Land, planning and power are the main requirements for a data centre site.   However, whilst there is a clear tension between the need to locate near population centres for latency reasons, and the pressure to move to regions with cheaper land and greener energy, as the market evolves so too do the nuances regarding data centre location needs.