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These latest commitments take the total investment in UK data centres to £25bn since July.
US firms CyrusOne, ServiceNow, Cloud HQ and CoreWeave have announced investments to a total of £6.3bn for data centre infrastructure in the UK.
The announcement was made yesterday (14 October) at the UK’s International Investment Summit and takes the total investment in UK data centres to more than £25bn since the Labour party took charge this July.
“Tech leaders from all over the world are seeing Britain as the best place to invest with a thriving and stable market for data centres and AI development,” said UK technology secretary Peter Kyle.
Washington DC-based data centre provider CloudHQ is developing a new £1.9bn data centre campus in Didcot, Oxfordshire, which is estimated to create 100 full-time jobs once operational.
ServiceNow, a cloud computing platform developer, plans to invest £1.15bn into its UK business over the next five years. The investment will go towards expanding the company’s data centres with Nvidia GPUs for local processing data and support AI development in the country.
CyrusOne, a global data centre developer, will be expanding its investment into the UK to a total of £2.5bn over the coming years and AI hyperscaler CoreWeave, which recently opened its European headquarters in London, announced an investment of £750m to support AI cloud infrastructure, building on a £1bn investment announced in May.
“Data centres power our day-to-day lives and boost innovation in growing sectors like AI,” said Kyle. The UK government designated data centres as “critical infrastructure” last month, giving them the same importance as vital services such as water and energy while inviting major investments into its data centre infrastructure.
Eric Schwartz, the president and CEO of CyrusOne, said this critical designation for data centres was “a strong signal that data centres are of strategic importance to the UK economy”.
Also last month, Amazon Web Services announced an £8bn investment into the UK’s digital infrastructure over the next five years, while privatecompany DC01UK announced a £3.75bn investment for a data centre in Hertfordshire.
While the growth of data centres is welcomed by some, their massive energy use has led to debates about how to balance growth with security of supply and climate emissions targets.
In the UK, energy consumed by data centres has risen by 400pc since 2015, and studies suggest that the global AI industry, a part of what’s causing a data centre boom, could be independently consuming as much energy as the Netherlands by 2027.
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