The datacentre news agenda for 2025 was set within weeks of the new year getting underway, with the publication of the UK government’s AI (artificial intelligence) opportunities action plan policy paper. The paper detailed the government’s commitment to rapidly increasing the nation’s AI datacentre infrastructure capacity, as part of a broader bid to position the UK as an AI superpower.
The government’s contribution would be the creation of a series of AI growth zones (AIGZ) in parts of the country where energy access and minimal planning restrictions would be assured – making them ideal locations for AI datacentres to be sited. Fast forward to the end of 2025, and several AIGZ sites have been confirmed by the government, with more expected to be announced over the course of the coming year.
Having promised to lower the planning barriers to datacentres in its pre-election manifesto in 2024, the government courted controversy by approving a series of builds that the previous administration had denied, while also supporting the growth of its fair share of new projects this year.
As the UK marches towards building more datacentres, concerns about the impact all this growth will have on the nation’s energy security continue to persist, along with calls for operators to do more to ensure their sites are operated in an environmentally sustainable manner.
With all that in mind, here are Computer Weekly’s top 10 datacentre stories of 2025.
1. The UK government’s AI datacentre growth agenda called into question
Within days of the AI opportunities action plan paper dropping in January 2025, questions were being asked about whether the UK government has what it takes to turn its rhetoric about the development of AI datacentres paving the way for massive economic growth into reality.
As reported by Computer Weekly, UK tech market watchers raised concerns about how the government’s plans would be funded, and queried whether building AI datacentres would translate into take-up of the technology within public and private sector organisations.
2. Concerns about UK’s energy security persist as AI datacentre boom takes hold
Energy security concerns are a long-standing topic within the UK datacentre sector, particularly over the course of the past decade, as the demand for compute capacity from the hyperscale cloud and internet giants has soared.
However, with the UK government’s championing of large-scale, AI datacentre campuses that will be used to host extremely energy-intensive workloads, these concerns have increased measurably over the course of the past year.
With the UK under pressure to decarbonise the grid, while needing to meet the growing energy needs of a growing number of datacentres, debate about the best way to balance both these pressures raged throughout 2025.
3. AI datacentre boom prompts calls for alternative serve farm builds
With some datacentre operators appearing to trend towards building increasingly bigger datacentres and server farms to meet the UK’s growing AI compute needs, others were putting forward alternative ideas about how to achieve the same thing.
This was out of concern that the UK only has limited amounts of viable space to build huge, AI campuses, prompting calls for smaller-scale, more innovative builds to be explored instead. Among the ideas being put forward included the notion of repurposing the UK’s commercial property and office spaces and turning those into datacentres.
4. Waning hyperscale demand for colocation capacity raises eyebrows
Like any market that is going through a growth spurt, questions about how long the datacentre boom would last for have dogged the sector this year as stories have emerged about some hyperscalers pulling out of projects.
There was a story that broke in March 2025 about Microsoft allegedly cancelling and deferring a series of datacentre lease agreements in both the US and Europe over the course of the previous months.
Real estate consultancy CBRE also published a report in November 2025 that touched on the waning appetites of hyperscale cloud firms for colocation capacity across Europe.
5. Government announces first wave of AI Growth Zones
Elsewhere, local authorities and businesses seemed keen to get involved in the UK government’s AI datacentre growth push, with the news that more than 200 local authorities had submitted expressions of interest for their areas to become AIGZs in April 2025.
The government initially said it would announce which of these bids had been successful by the summer of 2025, but it wasn’t until the autumn that it started to release details of where the first wave of AIGZs would be, with Wales and the North East of England emerging as winners.
6. Government accused of ignoring environmental concerns when overturning denied datacentre planning decisions
The government’s pre-election manifesto, released ahead of the new administration coming to power in July 2024, hailed datacentres as being a growth sector that it would be championing in the interests of economic growth.
As such, there were commitments made about lowering the planning barriers to datacentres to encourage operators to build more of them in the UK, plus pledges to review projects the previous government had denied planning for.
This year has seen the government deliver on both those promises, although its delivery on the latter has seen it accused of disregarding environmental concerns and the wishes of local communities when overturning some of these planning decisions.
7. Datacentre operators accused of faltering on collecting sustainability data
Research from datacentre resiliency think tank the Uptime Institute revealed this year that datacentre operators are seemingly becoming more negligent when it comes to collecting sustainability data about how their sites operate.
The organisation’s 15th annual Uptime Institute global datacentre survey revealed that during the 12 months to July 2025, the amount of sustainability data being collected by operators across almost all metrics has stagnated or even declined.
8. Equinix plots £3.9bn investment in Hertfordshire datacentre campus
In the autumn of 2024, details emerged about a plan by a newly created company, going by the name of DC01UK, to build a £3.75bn hyperscale datacentre on a plot of green belt land in Hertfordshire. At the time, the project was billed as being one of the biggest developments of its kind in Europe.
The project was trumpeted by the government as being precisely the kind of initiaitve its pro-datacentre growth push was intended to support the development of, despite the company overseeing it only being in operation since July 2024.
Fast-forward to January 2025 and news emerged that the project, despite a sizeable amount of local opposition, had secured planning permission, and in October 2025 it emerged that colocation giant Equinix had acquired the site and planned to invest £3.9bn in its development.
9. Datacentre energy demands set to soar by 2030 as AI growth accelerates, predicts Gartner
With the AI datacentre bubble showing no signs of bursting as 2025 comes to a close, IT market watcher Gartner shared some sobering predictions about the impact all this growth would have on global electricity supply and demand trends over the next five years.
Its projections suggested the electricity demands of datacentres would grow by 16% in 2025 and are on course to double by 2030. At the same time, Gartner analysts estimate that the amount of electricity consumed by the global datacentre market will hit 448 terrawatt hours (TWh) in 2025, rising to 980 TWh by 2030, with much of this energy consumed by power-hungry AI workloads hosted in these datacentres.
10. The National Grid steps up to meet energy demands of UK datacentres
Meanwhile, in the UK, the National Grid has embarked on several projects and technology partnerships this year, geared towards bolstering the UK’s energy security. They include investments that will increase the capacity of key substations, located close to notable datacentre hubs – including West London and Oxfordshire.
In September 2025, the National Grid also set out plans to pilot the use of a technology that promises to allow artificial intelligence (AI) datacentres to flexibly adjust how much power they draw from the grid, as part of a push to reduce the potential burden these facilities have on UK power supplies.
The work is part of a planned five-year investment push, valued at £35bn, by the National Grid that is geared towards increasing the UK’s electricity generation capacity, and making it easier for datacentres and gigafactories to connect to the grid.
