{"id":659016,"date":"2026-06-26T08:39:08","date_gmt":"2026-06-26T08:39:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/659016\/"},"modified":"2026-06-26T08:39:08","modified_gmt":"2026-06-26T08:39:08","slug":"slough-is-like-an-experiment-europes-largest-datacentre-hub-leaves-town-sweltering-extreme-heat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/659016\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Slough is like an experiment\u2019: Europe\u2019s largest datacentre hub leaves town sweltering | Extreme heat"},"content":{"rendered":"

The community living next to the largest datacentre park<\/a> in Europe say the scorching summer heat has grown unbearable.<\/p>\n

On days like Wednesday, said Nabeel Nawaz, the store manager of a Chaiiwala franchise in the centre of Slough, the heat is like something \u201cpinching your body and burning your skin\u201d.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Nabeel Nawaz: The heat is like something \u2018pinching your body.\u2019 Photograph: Martin Godwin\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 owned and maintained by companies like Equinix and Digital Realty \u2013 serve dozens of clients, including the world\u2019s biggest tech companies: Amazon, Google, Oracle and Microsoft.<\/p>\n

More are still to be built in a planned development<\/a> on the edge of the same campus.<\/p>\n

Emerging research \u2013 including a preprint of a paper<\/a> led by researchers at Cambridge earlier this year \u2013 suggests datacentres create a heat island effect, pushing up temperatures in their immediate vicinity by an average of 2C, and as much as 9C.<\/p>\n

This is because of the cooling systems required to keep down the temperature of sensitive electronics, including cutting-edge AI chips. The government has proposed<\/a> using the waste heat from datacentres to warm thousands of homes.<\/p>\n

Slough is one of the largest datacentre hubs in the world. Photograph: Martin Godwin\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

Andrea Marinoni, an associate professor at Cambridge and one of the authors of the paper, said the work was still nascent. His research \u2013 which controls for other factors such as urbanisation and the climate crisis, and was based on decades of satellite data \u2013 suggests the increase of 2C was robust worldwide: the paper cites datacentre complexes in Brazil and Spain.<\/p>\n

But this may underestimate the effect of a hub like Slough on its surroundings, he said. His work focuses on datacentres built over the past decades, most of which are far smaller than the ones currently under construction \u2013 with a typical power consumption of, at most, 100 megawatts.<\/p>\n

Sites like Slough, which is widely reported<\/a> to have roughly a gigawatt of datacentres, are of a different scale, and with potentially far greater effects.<\/p>\n

\u201cSlough is almost like an experiment by itself in the sense that the new investments in datacentres are bringing to life a new generation of datacentres,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we measured were what we can call the first generation of datacentres that were the ones that were implemented in the last 20 years. Slough is a different context for the scaling up of datacentres, and is something that is quite unprecedented.\u201d<\/p>\n

On Wednesday in Slough, datacentres multiple storeys high and surrounded by security fencing emitted a low roar, like the sound of a generator. The closest weather station to the tech park, several blocks away, saw a high temperature of 36.7C that day<\/a> and 36.5C the day before; other weather stations in Slough and the surrounding area were cooler, at times by several degrees<\/a> \u2013 one in the centre of town, further from the tech park, reached 36.2C on Wednesday and 34.7C the day before. That pattern held through this week.<\/p>\n

A lot of people in Slough are aware of the datacentres, but they have mixed views. Photograph: Martin Godwin\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

For the residents of Slough, the datacentres are visible; adjacent to the high street, at times audible through the walls of their offices. There is plenty of debate about how they affect the area.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were having a chat about it the other day,\u201d says Didier Kindembe, who is taking his lunch break on the grass in the middle of the industrial park. \u201cI think it\u2019s the concrete too and not just the datacentres. There\u2019s a lot of concrete around, and it absorbs the heat.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kindembe\u2019s friend Matt, who asks to not give his surname, says Slough is consistently hotter than the surrounding areas. \u201cIn 2022, when there was the heatwave, the temperature in the car park was 45C. But when you drove towards Windsor it dropped to 39C.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople are questioning, why is it so hot? It\u2019s getting hotter,\u201d says Naveed Hussein, who has lived in Slough all his life.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy computer gives off a lot of heat. So does my phone. So I have to imagine that the big datacentres do as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

Others are not so sure. Nawaz, the manager of the Chaiiwala, says he discusses the question of the datacentres \u2013 and their effect on the area \u2013 with many people. A lot of people in Slough are aware of the datacentres, he says, but they have mixed views. The datacentres also create jobs for the community.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it\u2019s only 10% to 15% of why things are hotter. Most of it is climate change.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The community living next to the largest datacentre park in Europe say the scorching summer heat has grown…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":659017,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-659016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/659016","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=659016"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/659016\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/659017"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=659016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=659016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=659016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}