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A new Google datacentre in Essex is expected to emit more than half a million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year , equivalent to about 500 short-haul flights a week, planning documents show.
Spread across 52 hectares (128 acres), the Thurrock “hyperscale datacentre” will be part of a wave of mammoth computer and AI power houses if it secures planning consent.
The plans were submitted by a subsidiary of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, and the carbon impact emerged before a concerted push by Donald Trump’s White House and Downing Street to ramp up AI capacity in Britain. Multibillion-dollar investment deals with some of Silicon Valley’s biggest technology companies are expected to be announced during the US president’s state visit to the UK, which starts on Tuesday.
Keir Starmer’s government has forecast a 13-fold rise in the amount of computer processing power AI will use by 2035 and is scrambling to supply the datacentres to meet that demand in the hope the technology will boost Britain’s insipid economic productivity. Deals involving Nvidia, the world’s largest AI chip maker, and OpenAI, the company behind the ChatGPT AI assistant, are anticipated.
But campaigners have said a wave of massive new computer warehouses will crank up Britain’s greenhouse gas emissions and put pressure on finite power and water resources.
If allowed, the Thurrock complex will include up to four datacentres on “grey belt” land part-occupied by a former speedway and stock car track. It “will lead to a net increase in GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions of 568,727 tonnes CO₂е [carbon dioxide equivalent] per year in during the operational phase”, planning documents examined by the Guardian show.
That amounts to about 500 flights from Heathrow to Málaga every week, according to the UN’s International Civil Aviation Organization’s carbon calculator. Google’s planning application stresses this remains a “minor adverse and not significant impact when compared to the UK carbon budgets”, but campaigners disagree.
“Google’s planned facility in Essex will produce carbon emissions several times higher than those of an international airport,” said a spokesperson for Foxglove, a campaign group for fairer technology. “But this is just one of many ‘hyperscale’ datacentres that US big tech wants to impose on the UK – in pursuit of their own profits and regardless of the cost to our environment.
“Starmer’s government needs to stop bowing to the Trump-Big Tech agenda and start standing up for the interests of the UK public – otherwise we will all be paying for the tech giants’ datacentres, whether in terms of soaring energy bills, dwindling water supplies or a heating planet.”
Datacentres currently consume about 2.5% of the UK’s electricity, and demand on the grid is expected to increase fourfold by 2030, according to the House of Commons library.
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The British government does not believe datacentres will have a significant impact on the UK’s carbon budget because of its ambitious targets for electricity grid decarbonisation. Rather it is worried that without massive investment in new datacentres, the UK will fall behind international rivals, including France, resulting in a “compute gap” that “risks undermining national security, economic growth, and the UK’s ambition to lead in AI”, according to a July research paper from the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.
Other important datacentre projects include a £10bn scheme on the site of a former coal-fired power station near Blyth in Northumberland that was granted planning permission in March. It is poised to be at the heart of a UK-US deal involving Nvidia and OpenAI. It was also reported at the weekend that Google is in early-stage talks about building a mammoth datacentre on Teesside.
Bain & Company, a global business consultancy, said on Monday that AI and datacentres could account for 2% of global emissions and 17% of industrial emissions by 2035, with the impact highest in countries where fossil fuels still dominate power generation.
Google declined to comment on its planning application for the Thurrock site. On Teesside, it said: “We do not comment on rumours or speculation.”
