‘Slough is like an experiment’: Europe’s largest datacentre hub leaves town sweltering

A datacentre in Slough. Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian View image in fullscreen A datacentre in Slough. Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian ‘Slough is like an experiment’: Europe’s largest datacentre hub leaves town sweltering Emerging research suggests datacentres create a heat island effect, pushing up temperatures in the immediate vicinity by as much as 9C The community living next to the largest datacentre park in Europe say the scorching summer heat has grown unbearable. On days like Wednesday, said Nabeel Nawaz, the store manager of a Chaiiwala franchise in the centre of Slough, the heat is like something “pinching your body and burning your skin”. What is harder to establish is whether this heat is just the result of the climate emergency, and the growing industrial sprawl across London, or whether the dozens of energy-hungry datacentres that have sprung up are also contributing to the problem. View image in fullscreen Nabeel Nawaz: The heat is like something ‘pinching your body.’ Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian Ten miles (16km) west of Heathrow, Slough has become one of the largest datacentre hubs in the world, hosting an estimated 30 to 40 huge facilities, many of them on a campus in the centre of town. These – owned and maintained by companies like Equinix and Digital Realty – serve dozens of clients, including the world’s biggest tech companies: Amazon, Google, Oracle and Microsoft. More are still to be built in a planned development on the edge of the same campus. Emerging research – including a preprint of a paper led by researchers at Cambridge earlier this year – suggests datacentres create a heat island effect, pushing up temperatures in their immediate vicinity by an average of 2C, and as much as 9C. This is because of the cooling systems required to keep down the temperature of sensitive electronics, including cutting-edge AI chips. The government has proposed using the waste heat from datacentres to warm thousands of homes. View image in fullscreen Slough is one of the largest datacentre hubs in the world. Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian Andrea Marinoni, an associate professor at Cambridge and one of the authors of the paper, said the work was still nascent. His research – which controls for other factors such as urbanisation and the climate crisis, and was based on decades of satellite data – suggests the increase of 2C was robust worldwide: the paper cites datacentre complexes in Brazil and Spain. But this may underestimate the effect of a hub like Slough on its surroundings, he said. His work focuses on datacentres built over the past decades, most of which are far smaller than the ones currently under construction – with a typical power consumption of, at most, 100 megawatts. Sites like Slough, which is widely reported to have roughly a gigawatt of datacentres, are of a different scale, and with potentially far greater effects. “Slough is almost like an experiment by itself in the sense that the new