Without much fanfare London has become one of the world’s biggest markets for data centres anywhere in the world outside America

If the “dark satanic” cotton mills of Lancashire and the coal mines of Yorkshire were the physical embodiment of the first industrial revolution, this time around it is the anonymous blinking boxes that are data centres.

These blank-walled, humming warehouses of vast computing power support the digital cloud that has transformed the way we live over the past 15 years. Without them, smartphones as we know them would not exist.

Now increasingly they are dedicated to the AI technology that will shake everything up all over again. Data centres — DCs are they are known in the trade — are springing up all over Britain, often barely noticed, with perhaps 100 more in the pipeline.

They are particularly heavily concentrated in London and the South-East, close to some of the hungriest consumers of data in the financial services industries of the City and Docklands.

Indeed, without much fanfare London has become one of the world’s biggest markets for data centres anywhere in the world outside America. And the pace of their roll-out is about to accelerate.

When Donald Trump swept into the UK for his historic second state visit last month he brought with him the tech barons who run the world’s biggest and most influential corporations. Between them they pledged more than £31billion of infrastructure investment for the UK — much of it in the form of data centres.

Microsoft, for example, will fund the UK’s largest supercomputer at a new Nscale data centre in Loughton, on the Essex fringes of east London’s suburban sprawl. The facility will house 23,000 powerful chips known as graphics processing units (GPUs) from the world’s biggest company, Nvidia. It is expected to open in early 2027 to support AI research, healthcare and defence.

Not to be left out, Google marked the US President’s trip with the opening — carried out by Chancellor Rachel Reeves — of a new data centre of its own in Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire, 30 miles from central London. The site, the centrepiece of a £5 billion investment programme pledged by Google, will help meet growing demand for AI services such as Google Cloud, search and maps.

But long before Air Force One touched down at Heathrow another US billionaire had already made a huge pledge to develop data centres and cloud infrastructure. Oracle was founded and headed by Larry Ellison, the world’s second-richest man. He has a fortune valued at almost $400 billion and is the biggest funder of the Tony Blair Institute.

In March, the company said it will invest $5billion in Britain over the next five years to meet the “rapidly growing demand for its cloud services”.

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