The hype surrounding artificial intelligence (AI) has showed no signs of slowing down this year, and the impact of enterprises rushing to adopt the technology has dominated the datacentre news agenda in 2024.
The UK has seen all three of the major public cloud giants commit to building more datacentres to meet the demand for power-hungry AI workloads over the coming years, as market watchers warn that more space and power will need to be created to make room for such facilities.
Since coming to power in July 2024, the new government has responded to these concerns by vowing to lower the planning barriers to building new datacentres to accelerate the pace of new server farm builds and bolster the UK’s economic growth.
What remains unclear is how the datacentre operators and hyperscale cloud giants building these facilities can sustainably meet their development goals, without sacrificing their net-zero ambitions.
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) have all gone public with plans to invest billions of pounds in building AI datacentres, as the financial results of all three firms have benefited from enterprise interest in their various generative AI offerings.
GCP was first out the gate with its AI datacentre announcement in January 2024, as details emerged of its plans to build a $1bn datacentre in Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire.
This was followed by an announcement by Microsoft in July 2024 that it plans to spend more than $13bn on AI and cloud datacentres, while AWS made a five-year, multibillion-dollar pledge to build more AI-ready datacentres across the UK in September 2024.
While the hyperscalers reaped the benefits of the growing demand for their generative AI (GenAI) services, IT market watcher Gartner issued a warning in November 2024 that their AI datacentre expansion plans would cause energy supply and security constraints by 2027.
“The explosive growth of new hyperscale datacentres to implement GenAI is creating an insatiable demand for power that will exceed the ability of utility providers to expand their capacity fast enough,” warned Gartner vice-president analyst, Bob Johnson.
“In turn, this threatens to disrupt energy availability and lead to shortages, which will limit the growth of new datacentres for genAI and other uses from 2026.”
Datacentre resiliency thinktank The Uptime Institute also warned at the start of the year that operators might start to struggle in 2024 with ensuring their corporate and business goals align with their sustainability and net-zero ambitions, as demand for compute capacity continues to soar.
As a result, it predicted that 2024 would be the year when some datacentre operators and hyperscale cloud giants might be forced to revise down their sustainability targets. One of the reasons being for this is because AI will be fuelling demand for more power-hungry software and hardware, and there is not enough renewable energy in the grid to supply it all yet.
Similar warnings were issued by real estate consultancy JLL in January 2024, who said datacentre operators would need to rethink how they build and run their facilities because of how much more energy AI-based workloads consume.
To this point, it said that operators would need to build datacentres that were capable of housing much larger amounts of critical IT capacity, and would also need to rethink their approach to cooling and powering their facilities accordingly.
While operators were warned about needing to build future-proof facilities in the face of the growing demand for AI, figures from real estate consultancy CBRE revealed that spare datacentre capacity in all of the major European colocation hubs had hit an all-time low in August 2024.
The figures served to highlight just how much demand is outstripping supply across Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris and Dublin (FLAPD) as land shortages, power supply constraints and planning permission issues slowed the pace of new builds popping up.
With spare datacentre capacity being in such short supply, news of a sizeable datacentre build being denied planning permission for a second time in June 2024 made headlines.
The project, in Iver, Buckinghamshire, was denied planning on the basis it would “constitute an inappropriate development on Green Belt Land”.
After promising in its pre-election manifesto to lower the planning barriers to new datacentre builds, the new Labour government won the support of operators by placing two projects that had previously been denied planning permission under review within days of coming to power.
In the leadup to the election, the new administration had repeatedly talked up the datacentre market as being a major source of economic growth that it wanted to make more of by reducing the amount of red tape involved in getting new projects over the line.
The same month (July 2024) these previously denied projects were placed under review, the government also announced a consultation on lowering the planning barriers for new datacentre developments.
As detailed in the consultation document, the proposed changes could result in parcels of “grey belt land” within protected Green Belt Land being “brought forward into the planning system to meet development needs”.
It also mooted the idea of revising how the planning rules governing Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIP) apply to datacentres, so planning applications for them could be potentially fast-tracked.
The government followed this up in September 2024 with news that datacentres would be added to the list of critical national infrastructure types considered critically important to the efficient running of the UK.
For many within the UK datacentre community, this is a change that should have happened a very long time ago, given the important role datacentres play in powering the country’s increasingly digital economy ticking over.
Despite all the changes the government has promised or pushed through since coming to power, it has still found itself under pressure to do more to help the sector realise its full potential from UK tech trade association, TechUK.
In its view, the datacentre sector could become one of the UK’s fastest-growing sectors, but for it to realise its full potential will require greater collaboration between industry and decision-makers at both local and national government level.
To this point, TechUK said it would like to see more work done to improve grid connections and access to renewable sources of energy, and more effort made to close the datacentre skills gap.
