‘Slough is like an experiment’: Europe’s largest datacentre hub leaves town sweltering

The community living next to the largest datacentre park in Europe say the scorching summer heat has grown unbearable. On days like Wednesday, said Nabeel Nawaz, the store manager of a Chaiiwala franchise in the centre of Slough, the heat is like something “pinching your body and burning your skin”. What is harder to establish is whether this heat is just the result of the climate emergency, and the growing industrial sprawl across London, or whether the dozens of energy-hungry datacentres that have sprung up are also contributing to the problem. Nabeel Nawaz: The heat is like something ‘pinching your body.’ Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian Ten miles (16km) west of Heathrow, Slough has become one of the largest datacentre hubs in the world, hosting an estimated 30 to 40 huge facilities, many of them on a campus in the centre of town. These – owned and maintained by companies like Equinix and Digital Realty – serve dozens of clients, including the world’s biggest tech companies: Amazon, Google, Oracle and Microsoft. More are still to be built in a planned development on the edge of the same campus. Emerging research – including a preprint of a paper led by researchers at Cambridge earlier this year – suggests datacentres create a heat island effect, pushing up temperatures in their immediate vicinity by an average of 2C, and as much as 9C. …