The number of planning applications for data centres rose as much as 40% in the UK in 2024 as cloud companies raced to catch up with ever-growing demand for compute in AI, UKTN can reveal.

An analysis by UKTN tracked nearly 200 planning applications for data centres across more than 250 local authorities in England and Wales between 2020 and 2024. The analysis identified at least 38 separate applications for the construction of data centres in 2024, a rise of 40.7% compared to the previous year.

That figure remains down on the 50 applications identified in 2020, a record year, but likely amounts to significantly more compute power than the applications made during that year, owing to the increased size, footprint and prospective energy consumption featured in the designs of more recent plans.

Dame Dawn Childs, CEO of British Data Centre business Pure DC, told UKTN: “The significant change in the industry, particularly triggered by AI, is that if you go back a decade, a large data centre was maybe five or twenty megawatts.

“Now with AI adoption and increased power requirements, a twenty megawatt data centre is just a starting point, and now you’re getting 100 megawatts. With a legacy data centre, or even one where a planning application was put in several years ago, the design will now be outdated because it won’t be able to accommodate the AI workloads.”

The analysis also reveals that the fastest-growing regions for planning applications are outside London and the South East, the traditional hosts of data centre clusters, in signs cloud companies are seeking to diversify their compute capacity into into other regional tech hubs.

The Manchester and Salford area saw at least three data centre planning applications in 2023-24, compared to just one in 2020-21, while local authorities in Wales saw at least three applications for data centres in 2024, compared to none in 2020.

Of the applications tracked by UKTN, the regions of the North East, North West and Yorkshire represented nearly a quarter of prospective data centre sites, while the East of England accounted for 15% and Midlands accounted for 12%. London and the South East continued to dominate, with the two regions together representing 38% of applications.

“The different hyperscalers will be making bets in different ‘secondary markets’ if they’ve already got their base in London or Slough,” said Childs.

“If you’re a Microsoft, Google or Amazon, you might go to Leeds, Manchester or Salford and create a second zone there.

“You might then see activity in particular locations where for several data centres in close proximity, planning applications have been put together. Where there’s power availability and there’s constraint in London they’re moving out, moving north where the power is.”

The analysis comes amid the release of the government’s AI Opportunities Action Plan, spearheaded by serial entrepreneur Matt Clifford, which has called for the creation of a series of ‘AI Growth Zones’ dotted across the UK to attract clusters of AI expertise, in which normal planning processes would be overturned in favour of a fast-track approval system.

Under current rules it typically takes 5-7 years to complete the construction of a data centre in the UK, with cloud companies forced to navigate complex planning hurdles as well as difficulties in accessing sufficiently large energy supplies. Government officials have signalled that planning reform played a central role in the thinking behind the Action Plan.

The first zone identified under the Plan will be in Culham, Oxfordshire – home to the UK’s Atomic Energy Authority. In tandem with the plan, three major IT infrastructure companies – Vantage Data Centres, Nscale and Kyndryl – have committed to £14bn in investment into the UK to ramp up compute capacity to cater for the growing needs of AI.

UKTN was unable to collect data from a handful of local authorities, due to constrains with planning portal search functionality or the closing of portals for maintenance during January.

With additional reporting by Oscar Hornstein.

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