A short drive from London, the town of Potters Bar is separated from the village of South Mimms by 85 acres of rolling farmland segmented by a scribble of hedgerows. In one of the fields, a lone oak serves as a rest stop along a public footpath. Lately, the tree has become a site of protest, too. A poster tied to its trunk reads: \u201cNO TO DATA CENTRE.\u201d<\/p>\n
In September 2024, a property developer applied for permission<\/a> to build an industrial-scale data center\u2014one of the largest in Europe\u2014on the farmland. When locals caught wind, they started a Facebook group<\/a> in hopes of blocking the project. More than 1,000 people signed up.<\/p>\n The local government has so far dismissed the group\u2019s complaints. In January 2025, it granted<\/a> planning permission. The following October, multinational datacenter operator Equinix acquired the land<\/a>; it intends to break ground this year.<\/p>\n On a dismal Thursday afternoon in January, I huddled around a gate leading onto the farmland with Ros Naylor\u2014one of the Facebook group\u2019s admins\u2014and six other local residents. They told me that they object to the data center on various grounds, but particularly to the loss of green space, which they see as an invaluable escape route from town to countryside and buffer against the highway and fuel stop visible on the horizon. \u201cThe beauty of walking in this area is coming through this space,\u201d says Naylor. \u201cIt\u2019s incredibly important for mental health and wellbeing.\u201d<\/p>\n As the UK government races to meet the voracious demand<\/a> for data centers that can be used to train AI models and run AI applications, similarly large facilities stand to be built across<\/a> the<\/a> country<\/a>. For the people who live in closest proximity, though, the prospect that AI might buoy the economy or infuse new capabilities into their smartphone is thin consolation for what they consider a disruption to a countryside way of life.<\/p>\n Bonfire of Red Tape<\/p>\n Since the mid-20th century, London has been hemmed in on all sides by a nearly contiguous patchwork of land known as the green belt, made up of farms, forest, meadows, and parks. Under UK law, construction is only permitted on green belt land in \u201cvery special circumstances<\/a>.\u201d The aim is to protect areas of countryside from urban encroachment and stop neighboring towns from melding into an amorphous blob.<\/p>\n After the present government came to power in 2024, however, the UK introduced a new land classification<\/a>\u2014grey belt\u2014to describe underperforming parcels of green belt on which construction should be more readily permitted. At around the same time, the government announced it would treat data centers as \u201ccritical national infrastructure.\u201d Together, those changes have cleared the way<\/a> for a raft of new data centers<\/a> to be built across the UK.<\/p>\n As they attempt to develop models capable of surpassing human intelligence<\/a>, the world\u2019s largest AI labs are planning to spend trillions of dollars<\/a> in aggregate on infrastructure. Across the globe, wherever new data centers are being built, developers are encountering organized resistance<\/a> from impacted communities.<\/p>\n When the local planning authority approved the Potters Bar data center, its officers concluded that the farmland met the definition of grey belt. They also said their decision was colored by the government\u2019s support for the data center industry. The benefits from an infrastructure development and economic standpoint, they concluded, outweighed the loss of green space.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople have this slightly romantic idea that all green belt land comprises pristine, rolling green fields. The reality is that this site, along with many others, is anything but that,\u201d says Jeremy Newmark, leader of Hertsmere Borough Council, the constituency that encompasses Potters Bar. \u201cIt\u2019s a patch of very low-performing green belt land.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A short drive from London, the town of Potters Bar is separated from the village of South Mimms…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":430228,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,1336,1674,464,388,86,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-430227","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-data","12":"tag-data-centers","13":"tag-infrastructure","14":"tag-london","15":"tag-technology","16":"tag-uk","17":"tag-united-kingdom","18":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=430227"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430227\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/430228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=430227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=430227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=430227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}