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....