As little as five years ago you never heard about data centres. If you told people you worked ‘in data centres’ they’d either have no idea what you were talking about, or they’d quickly find someone else to talk to. They were the un-seen, unknown and certainly underappreciated "sheds" that didn’t add anything to society.
At my desk, I’ve still got framed the reply I was sent on LinkedIn in 2022 from a middle-aged executive who proudly told me (and his 3,724 digital followers) he’d never felt the need to use a data centre and had no intention of doing so anytime soon. To him, and probably many others – we were ‘irrelevant’.
When data centres did come out of the shadows and were featured by the media, it was only because something had gone catastrophically wrong.
‘Data centre downtime’ was the excuse why you were hot and bothered, standing in Gatwick along with thousands of others unable to board your flight. They were the reason your online banking went down, or why your GP appointment had disappeared. Essentially, if you heard ‘data centres’ on the news it was because a lot of people, somewhere, were pulling their hair-out.
On top of that, our industry was continually associated with the negative. You never saw the local MP proudly cutting the ribbon on the next data centre in their constituency. No one even wanted us anywhere near their constituency.
The Daily Telegraph famously referred to data centres in 2022 as ‘energy vampires’, and press have focused over the years on how data centres are plunging the world into crisis by using too much water, taking-up valuable land, delaying housing developments and employing few.
Even at an application level it was bad news. Data centres either wasted everyone’s time powering that annoying YouTube video you wish your kids had never found, or they made Bitcoin and all the disruption and chaos that brought possible, or the AI compute inside our data centres would eventually either take all of our jobs, or just go full Skynet and kill us all.
Put simply, there were easier propositions to market than data centres...
However, thankfully, times are changing!
Firstly, the Covid-19 pandemic provided a global platform across which data centres could finally prove their worth. The extraordinary pace of vaccine development, our rapid analysis and early warning of emerging Covid strains and our reliance on data centres to keep in touch, work from home and entertain ourselves was pivotal. Data centres suddenly became ‘useful’.
Jump forward and just last month data centres were classified as critical national infrastructure by the new UK government propelling them into everyone’s front-of-mind, and classifying their importance on the same level as food, water and healthcare. Useful first. Now, ‘critical’.
The momentum has continued further. Last week data centres were prime-time on Sky TV, an audience of more than a million, with Greater Manchester's visionary Mayor, Andy Burnham stood alongside our CEO, Doug Loewe welcoming the ground-break of what will become the North of England’s largest data centre in Stockport. Useful first, then critical, now ‘welcomed’.
Andy Davis, creater of Data Centre Club and a guy who has done a lot of tremendous work to promote our industry, summed it up perfectly - "who remembers when data centres were a secret?" This kind of recognition and positive attention on our industry would have seemed unthinkable five years ago. Data centres are finally out of the back-cupboard, the media focus on them is starting to become more balanced and the country, and government are starting to acknowledge their economic potential.
Our Greater Manchester data centre for example will create 2,000 jobs during the demolition, design, construction, and fit-out phases which will last 2-3 years. More high-net worth jobs will be created in the facility itself, and hundreds more through the customers who use the data centre, the wider supply chain, and the companies who have to locate close to the data centre to facilitate our customers. The data centre 'ripple effect' in full force! The facility is also being designed to be one of the most environmentally friendly data centres in the world, and a 40MW campus like this can help catalyse the development of new renewables - we're already proving this with our energy procurement strategy.
There are many reasons to be proud of data centres in this country. Our industry is one of the UK’s most successful and one of the fastest growing. Remarkably our little island is home to the world’s second largest data centre hub, and the largest in Europe. We’re third, only to the USA and China, in AI development and we’ve got more high growth AI start-ups than France and Germany combined. In a country that likes to often focus on what we’re not good at anymore – data centres are bucking the trend, and are one of the greatest success stories this country has never told.
Of course, no matter how well we build digital infrastructure there will always be cases of downtime and data centres will continue to be a lazy target for using too much power and other associated evils. But, largely because society has realised firsthand that they are useful, critical and underpin our increasingly digital lives, they are starting to become welcomed, and we're starting to see a step-change in how they are perceived by both government and the public. Long may that continue.
Adam Nethersole
Adam Nethersole is VP of Marketing at Kao Data and his experience covers a decade of working within data centres and digital infrastructure. Interested in green tech and sustainable computing.