Executive Summary

• 15000 homes or 1 data centre is the hard choice Steve Reed faces; Brick Lane is a hot topic with public outcry as planning permission for a high-frequency trading data centre is being debated.
• A report found data centres are delaying housing delivery because the grid just can’t handle both; it does beg the question of whether industry operators and decision-makers are taking this into account when planning and site selection, seeing as there’s growing public opposition to new infrastructure projects.
• If developers continue to treat dense, urban neighbourhoods rich with history, culture and community as merely geographic coordinates with low latency, then they are going to face the wall of public fury, which will be the downfall of their projects.

If you went on a stroll on a typical Friday night in Brick Lane, you’d experience a bouquet of scents – the rich aroma of turmeric and toasted cumin from curry houses, the smell of mustard and salted-beef bagels from 24-hour ovens and the vibrant clash of street art and vintage markets. Now, imagine walking down the same street,  but where the brewery was is a huge, windowless, humming data centre.  It doesn’t scream community, does it?

On one side of Brick Lane, there are 31,000 people on the waiting list for social housing that the region doesn’t have. On the other side is a 5.2MW data centre being proposed, with the purpose of high-frequency trading. The power needed to support it is equivalent to powering 15,000 homes, making it a zero-sum trade-off. It would “bring literally no benefit to anyone living here,” resident and member of the Save Brick Lane campaign, Jonathan Moberly, told the Guardian.

The grid is a zero-sum game

With a recent report published by the London Assembly stating that data centres are delaying housing delivery because the grid just can’t handle both, it does beg the question of whether industry operators and decision-makers are taking the community into account when planning and proposing sites for data centres. We’re talking about enough electricity to power 15,000 homes, which would be a huge positive change for the Tower Hamlets community and the people who are currently struggling to find housing. In such a terrible housing crisis, is pushing to become a tech and AI hub worth telling local families they have to wait five more years for a home because of a data centre? It’s a harsh reality and one that the industry needs to balance sooner rather than later and site selection is becoming absolutely crucial to tread carefully on.

The power play

In July last year, Tower Hamlets Council democratically rejected the brewery redevelopment plans after a huge local outcry, with Housing Secretary Steve Reed stepping in and calling in the decision and he will do so again this time around. In a hugely murky grey area, who gets to call the shots? When the local democracy says they need homes and the national government says we need more data centres, who owns the neighbourhood?

And with such large public opposition, what happens next? Oliver Hayes of Global Action Plan talks of communities everywhere are “resisting data centres… (in) fear they will drive up bills and monopolise power and water. They feel that the only winners will be Silicon Valley billionaires, while people and the environment suffer.” He calls for the UK government to follow numerous cities around the world in calling a moratorium on new AI data centres until there’s a needs-based plan for how many are needed and what for. This follows the announcement that the Scottish government is considering a sweeping moratorium applying to all data centre projects that don’t have planning permission, especially because a number of companies are flocking to Scotland to build infrastructure because of energy supply and land availability; there are 24 projects currently in various planning stages, most notably the Fife project, which is in the news for the large public opposition.

The industry’s challenge

If developers continue to treat dense, urban neighbourhoods rich with history, culture and community as merely geographic coordinates with low latency, then they are going to face the wall of public fury, which will be the downfall of their projects. Site selection needs to be more of a thought-out process, and the industry needs to stop hiding behind corporate social responsibility jargon and take communities into account in the planning stages. If they want to build in a community and utilise their land, water and power, they need to give something back of equal human value, whether that’s direct district heating for social housing, local grid updates, or genuine public spaces.