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The rapid growth of data centres is delaying new homes in London
- wcoenen 11mo agoThe map of planned data centers shows how badly the UK needs to split its single pricing zone for electricity. There should be more incentive to build data centers in the north, where there is plenty of renewable power but limited capacity to transport that power south. Germany also has a single pricing zone and a similar north/south problem. It causes expensive curtailment and redispatch operations whenever the grid cannot physically transport the power from north to south the way it was traded.
- kristianc 11mo agoI'd imagine that a large part of the demand for data centres in the South is driven by the need for extreme low latency with the City of London and other financial centres like Frankfurt. It's all well to say there should be more incentive to build data centres in the North, but physics is physics.
- afavour 11mo agoIt could be that. Or it could just be that it’s logistically easier to keep your data centre close to your London office.
- chii 11mo agowhich is why the price in electricity isn't truly being reflected properly by the cost of distribution. If it costs less up north, then there would be incentive to move demand there (for data centers, which is more location agnostic). But if the price is the same up north, then the locality becomes a deciding factor.
- parineum 11mo agoThrow this in the bin of "fun consequences of price controls".
- baq 11mo agoOTOH a market without a regulator is literally a jungle
- pas 11mo agoa diverse productive ecosystem?
- baq 11mo agoA system in which your the stronger you are, the more rights you have
- pas 11mo agothat's not a jungle, rights come from a social contract and all the complicated social technology we usually operate to try to manifest said rights. in a jungle there are niches, and opportunities, and even though there are very strong participants, no one is invincible, especially outside their niche.
- baq 11mo agothe jungle is a place where the social contract is decided by the physically strongest players. the strongest player in the jungle is the man and the jungle only exists because he decided to not level it and turn it into a palm oil farm. in that sense you're right, I completely agree, no one is invincible there.
- sysguest 11mo agowell is the demand about inference or training?
- kristianc 11mo agoThe existing cluster of data centres in West London pre-dates the current AI boom, and the UK's "IT corridor" is generally based between London and Reading and Oxford and Cambridge. There's an emerging tech hub in the North West, but generally it's not there yet.
- novok 11mo agomaybe time to move the city of london's data centers too? meta doesn't have a huge data center in their corporate offices either.
- colechristensen 11mo agothe amount of DC space that is actually interested in those extremely low latencies is very small
- flowerthoughts 11mo agoIt seems fine that financial centers subsidise other regions. GP wasn't asking to ban building the data centers there, just make it more expensive. Because the delivery is more expensive.
- jillesvangurp 11mo agoLow latency is desirable for stock traders. Most of the data center growth isn't driven by that but by non latency critical workloads such as AI. The reason, data centers choose to be near London is because there is no pricing advantage to go up north. Even though energy is plentiful, readily accessible, and often curtailed when there's too much of it there. If there was a pricing difference, you'd see a lot more economic activity up north. Basically the physical advantage is there but the lack of economics cover it up and wipe out the advantage.
- vasco 11mo agoI have a much better proposal, we move the City of London (not London itself), to the North. The bankers would learn about scotland and everyone else would be better off.
- jjgreen 11mo agoPlease do this, please
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- andy_ppp 11mo agoDoesn’t the electricity move through the national grid fairly well? I don’t don’t disagree though, data centres in the north where there’s more space seems sensible.
- citrin_ru 11mo ago1. North-south links in the UK are already fully utilised. There are more in works and plans but not sure it’s enough to meet even existing demand. 2. Transmission losses are substantial.
- amoshebb 11mo ago"About 1.7% of the electricity transferred over the transmission network is lost" https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201415/cmselect/cmenergy/386/38607.html https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201415/cmselect/cmen...
- chickenbig 11mo agoTransmission in this sense does not include distribution losses (by the DNOs, at lower voltages). 8% in your link. The UK government is now touting datacentre sites with better access to the national grid (transmission network) to avoid the issues inherent in the distribution networks. E.g. Culham which had a grid connection to power the JET fusion experiments.
- pacifika 11mo agoThat plan was rejected later in July 2025, some energy firms say it could have scared off investment https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cdr3e78112po https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cdr3e78112po
- chickenbig 11mo ago> There should be more incentive to build data centers in the north There are clustering advantages for data centres. Lower inter-cluster latency being key. I do not think the UK market is large enough for two hubs, really.
- 6510 11mo agoNot sure how thing are today but I hear the weirdest story from a German farmer a decade or so ago: They make biogas then turn it into electricity and sell it to the grid for next to nothing. What they really wanted was to pump it into the gas net for domestic use but this wasn't allowed because it is of better quality than the "normal" Russian gas. Apparently someone really cares if some other customer got better gas for the same price(!?) He was rather pissed off about it. That and some remark that they didn't produce enough gas for the entire country. He said, we are suppose to make enough gas for the entire country but do so without selling it. They did have an association with plans to make biogas from hemp at scale. It just cant happen. edit: Apparently their law makers came to their senses since.
- downrightmike 11mo agoOnce the bubble pops, maybe they can be converted into homes?
- odie5533 11mo agoJust like shopping malls
- tinktank 11mo agoIt's _never_ going to pop. It'll just inflate and inflate until it's big enough to take us all with it. To the singularity.
- saidinesh5 11mo agoWhy? Even if the data centers are built for just AI, they can just ditch the GPUs and reuse them for storage etc .. no? Everyone seems to be carrying a smartphone, continuously creating more high res photos and videos..
- novok 11mo agoSeeing how short all the buildings are in London, its housing shortage is obviously fairly self imposed in that city.
- Maxion 11mo agoLack of housing is almost always a zoning issue. Builders will always build if there's money to be made and people to sell houses to. The only reason they're not is because they're not allowed to.
- andy_ppp 11mo agoYou’re often not even allowed to build things that aren’t in keeping with the area even if nobody can see the bits of the property. It’s mostly about stopping people nearby having a nicer house than you. You could easily build plenty of high rises but they are either insanely overpriced or extremely poor quality in London.
- 11mo ago
- bpodgursky 11mo agoIt is truly embarrassing the lengths the UK will go to avoid simply generating more electricity.
- _trampeltier 11mo agoIt's not about "not enought ectricity". It's about they need thicker cables and bigger substations.
- option 11mo agoYeah, like building infrastructure stuff!
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- nikanj 11mo agoAnd to avoid simply building more homes. There's been a housing shortage for 50+ years, it's a little late to blame the 2025 datacenter craze for the problem
- delaminator 11mo ago[flagged]
- benced 11mo agoLondon has had a housing crisis long before anyone ever dreamed of an LLM.
- ipnon 11mo agoAnd it's had scapegoats for just as long! Everything is going according to plan really. It's not the tax scheme, or the zoning, or the construction costs, or the concentration of labor opportunities in London. Don't be daft! Britain seems interested in actively undoing technological progress for some reason. A deindustrial revolution you might call it!
- gpjanik 11mo agoThanks god we're getting rid of nuclear energy btw.
- tonyedgecombe 11mo agoThe UK is building new nuclear (albeit slowly).
- lkramer 11mo agoDidn't the gov just announce new reactors were being built? In any case UK has a lot of windpower.
- Smaug123 11mo agoWe have at least recently accepted the Fingleton report's findings (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nuclear-regulatory-taskforce https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nuclear-regulator...) which is an attempt to get rid of a bunch of administrative blockers. I'm not aware of any new reactors being announced?
- lkramer 11mo agoI was thinking of this: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/rolls-royce-smr-selected-to-build-small-modular-nuclear-reactors https://www.gov.uk/government/news/rolls-royce-smr-selected-...
- stuaxo 11mo agoThat's not happening right now.
- ZeroGravitas 11mo agoThe price of electricity in the UK is going up right now to start paying for the next nuclear plant 10 years (fingers crossed) in advance of it generating any electicity. They literally invented the idea of applying Contracts for Difference from finance to help build nuclear in the UK. Those have massively helped renewables get built in the UK and elsewhere by letting governments cheaply subsidize financial risk in energy investments while allowing competitive developers to bid the price lower. But it wasn't enough for nuclear, where the builders didn't want to be on the hook for the inevitable doubling (or worse) of final cost, so they wrote special rules for new nuclear to be paid in advance and not held to cost estimates.
- djdjsjejb 11mo ago[flagged]
- Havoc 11mo agoVery much doubt this has anything to do with datacenters London is just slow and bureaucratic af
- londons_explore 11mo agoThe UK has very expensive electricity. Nobody builds a data center in the UK unless they need to for regulatory reasons or they got some grant conditional on it being in the UK. Huge power hungry GPU farms for AI training will end up built elsewhere...
- londons_explore 11mo agoElectricity use in the UK peaked in around 2004, and has since been declining. Per capita use is steeply down, but total usage is still 16% down. That means most grid infrastructure is now under utilised, and skills needed to build any new grid have dried up. Presumably there are still a few pockets that are at capacity, and that's where the problem lies.