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New Report: Big Tech Data Centres: a Threat to UK Decarbonisation

(01/10/25)

A new report by Global Action Plan and Foxglove estimates a significant rise in annual carbon emissions as a result of data centres planned or in construction in the UK.

Big Tech Data Centres:
A Threat to UK decarbonisation

The report uses figures from data centre developers’ own carbon emissions estimations included in their proposals. Just by looking at ten of the largest data centre proposals, the estimated carbon emissions add up to 2,745,538 tonnes of CO2 equivalent. This is roughly equivalent to the annual carbon saving in 2025 from the public’s switch to electric vehicles (the Climate Change Committee (CCC) puts this at 2.9 million tonnes).

Ten of the largest data centres will emit as much carbon each year as saved by the public switching to electric vehicles.

However, this figure only counts emissions from ten of the larger data centres that provided estimates. The BBC has reported 100 datacentres currently in planning or construction, however Global Action Plan and Foxglove estimate this number to be significantly higher.

A major problem is the lack of consistent data for the emissions that will be caused by the rush to build even bigger and more energy-hungry data centres:

  • Many data centre proposals didn’t include any estimate of future carbon emissions.
  • There is a lack of national oversight and monitoring of the data centres being built and their impact on our climate.
  • Estimates of the carbon emissions from different data centres are wildly different: it is unclear why developments of similar size have such big differences in emissions estimates.
  • The figures provided by the developers are very likely to be under-estimates.

The report concludes that:

Urgent action is needed to address the threat data centres pose to the UK’s decarbonisation efforts. But to do so requires a clear, unbiased and consistent understanding of the existing and planned datacentres in the UK and their environmental impact.

The evidence outlined in the report further makes the case for why datacentre planning applications shouldn’t be approved without proper environmental impact assessments.

Recently, Global Action Plan and Foxglove issued a legal challenge to the Government’s decision to green-light an AI data centre in Buckinghamshire that had previously been rejected twice by the local council. This legal challenge is the first of this kind in the UK and has significant potential to influence how the government monitors and mitigates the environmental impact of datacentres in the future.

If you’d like to support this legal challenge, you can donate to Global Action Plan and Foxglove’s crowdfunder to help cover the legal costs and see this challenge through.   

Donate here: Stop the Government forcing through Destructive Data Centres  

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