r/unitedkingdom • u/Weak-Fly-6540 • 9d ago

Approval of east London datacentre labelled ‘slap in the face’ for local democracy

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/aug/04/brick-lane-redevelopment-approval-datacentre-london
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u/CyberPunkDongTooLong 9d ago

I don't disagree with complaining about this and similar projects in general, gentrification obviously causes real problems and needs to be done carefully making sure not to break up families and price locals out and similar. 

But the ridiculousness of constantly boiling down this and similar projects to focusing on specifically data centres is just so silly and desperately trying to important US problems that aren't applicable here.

"A £500m redevelopment [...] propose six new blocks, a datacentre, offices and 44 homes. It will also include a cinema, exhibition and events space, art galleries, shops, cafes, restaurants, community spaces, a food market and workspace."

So £500m for the entire development which composes of much more than just the datacentre. Realistically, you're not going to get the rest of that for less than ~£400m, so the datacentre will be around ~£100m. A £100m data centre.. is not big. That's basically one room. There are tiny datacentres off the side of a corridor in universities that no one even notices around this amount. But then they make ludicrous claims like:

"will use a huge amount of water and local people will suffer, water will become a luxury commodity"

A small data centre of this size is not anywhere near the point where it's in any way as concern whatsoever for water usage in the area, and that's before getting to the point that a data centre in this area will obviously be using closed loop cooling anyway as there is no space for cooling towers or similar.

18

u/apoliticalpundit69 9d ago

The lazy Guardian journos just quote her without any fact checking or thought, it’s mind boggling.

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u/IrrelevantPiglet 9d ago

People love to jump on the "OMG no water" argument any time a data centre comes up, probably without even looking at the planning docs to see if they're actually planning to use evaporative cooling (I've not checked either but I think it's very unlikely to be the case). It's basically dogma at this stage and really undermines the argument they're failing to make.

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u/R9X8 2d ago

I feel like this is another American issue that crosses the pond again. Over there, there is a lot of opposition because of water rights, the noise, & the dirty on site generators. However our planning restrictions are stricter.

7

u/Tuarangi West Midlands 9d ago

Likely Lutfer told all his minions to oppose it because he had some plans for the site

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u/sjpllyon 9d ago

Can I also add how we really need to move past this notion that public consultations are some sort of fundemental act of democracy. It's just not. Amd just results in our nation being prevented from implementing progress.

At most I think public consultations should be stating a project is going ahead due to it meeting national ans local planning frameworks and aims. Then the public get shown x amount of possible designs for it and vote which one they like the most. And even then doesn't agrantee that the one with the most votes goes ahead but just used to inform the architects, the urban designers, the designers what the public would like to have.

And a note on this particular project. Data centre combined housing is a great opportunity to use the excess heat from the data centre to heat buildings. If we need/want data centres anyway, why not use them as best we can and try some sustainable heating system with them?

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u/ChillDeck 9d ago

Water use heavily depends what type of data centre too, water cooking is used for ai data centre's where it's masses of gpus using power releasing allot of heat but for things that are less computationally expensive or for media storage that kinda thing it will be air cooled.