London's 99 Data Centres Collide With Housing and Water Limits

London has 99 data centres. Together they pull roughly 760MW at peak, about the electricity load of 750,000 homes, and the queue for new grid connections is running at around ten times what the local network can currently supply. Those numbers, reported by the Financial Times and detailed in a Greater London Authority-commissioned report also written up by The Big Issue, are the reason the AI build-out is starting to bump into the rest of the city's infrastructure in visible ways.

The most concrete collision is housing. The west London grid has been effectively full since 2022, and the GLA has warned that three boroughs, Hillingdon, Ealing and Hounslow, face pauses on new residential development because there isn't spare capacity to hook them up. That is landing in a city with 340,000 households on social housing waiting lists and 183,000 Londoners in temporary accommodation, so 'delay a housing scheme so a server hall can energise' is a hard political sell.

Water is the quieter half of the story. The London Assembly's planning committee, chaired by James Small-Edwards, has pushed for treating grid capacity as a planning input rather than an afterthought, and as The Register noted, the GLA's own line is that potable water cannot be increased in line with the combined demands of new housebuilding and rapid data centre growth. One gets prioritised over the other.

The honest caveat is that most of the specific numbers here trace back to a single GLA-commissioned report and the FT's write-up of it, and the reporting stops short of naming which individual projects are shelved or how much water each site actually draws today. The forward-looking bit is the market response. If west London stays choked, the relative winners are colo operators sited further out, liquid and dry cooling vendors, and on-site power providers that let an operator decouple from a connection queue that is, in effect, years long.