With the data centre market set to become a $7 trillion global industry by 2030, the UK must consider its readiness to compete in the next era of digital infrastructure. This growth, accelerated by the exponential rise of AI workloads, is fundamentally reshaping how and where compute capacity is required.
Our recent event 'Resilience Within Data Centres: the Future of Providing Skills, Power and Credible Supply Chain', co-partnered with NG Bailey and Corning and featuring Helen Kinsman, SVP Commercial & Regulatory Affairs, Virtus Data Centres, as the guest of honour, brought together industry leaders to explore the realities shaping the UK data centre landscape today. The discussion examined the scale of current demand driven by AI and cloud growth, as well as the structural pressures influencing how, where and whether that demand can be met.
While the UK is a world leader in the data centre market, its advantages are increasingly being tested by constraints in power availability, planning complexity, land access and wider policy clarity.
In this paper, we expand on these challenges and explore what is truly needed to build a stronger, more resilient and globally competitive future for UK digital infrastructure.
