As governments race to build AI infrastructure, communities across the world are discovering that the environmental and democratic costs of data centres are increasingly being pushed aside
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In early 2026, lawyers representing the UK government made a striking concession during a High Court challenge to plans for a hyperscale data centre on greenbelt land in Buckinghamshire. They admitted that the government’s own Environmental Impact Assessment screening process contained ‘a serious logical error’. The campaigning organisations Foxglove and Global Action Plan had won. However, the data centre will almost certainly be built anyway.
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This contradiction symbolises one of the defining planning conflicts of the digital age. As governments across the world race to become AI superpowers, they are designating data centres ‘critical national infrastructure’ and routing approvals around the democratic processes designed to protect communities from exactly this kind of development. The question being asked in Buckinghamshire, in Amsterdam, in Dublin, and in the suburbs of Santiago is the same: when a government decides that an industry is too strategically important to be subject to local accountability, who pays the price?
A planning system built to fast-track
The Woodlands Park case in Buckinghamshire reflects a deliberate policy direction. In October 2025, the UK government confirmed that data centres could opt into the Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIP) regime, a consenting route originally designed for power stations and motorways. Under this framework, planning decisions pass from local authorities to the Secretary of State, developers receive what lawyers describe as ‘super-consents’, and local opinions are circumvented. A National Policy Statement for data centres is being drafted, but until it comes into force, communities face approvals made without any established policy framework at all.
Meanwhile, in North Ockendon, east London – the proposed site of what could become Europe’s largest data centre complex – the Environmental Law Foundation issued a formal legal letter to Havering Council. The action came after residents were given just 28 days to respond to more than 2,700 pages of technical documentation, which campaigners argued may have breached Aarhus Convention rights on public participation.
In Scotland, the data centre applications currently in the planning system would require between 4,450 MW and 8,250 MW of electricity, potentially doubling Scotland’s entire energy demand. Still, no national strategic environmental assessment has been undertaken.
The energy problem is compounding in another direction too: more than 100 UK data centres are now planning to burn gas for electricity, after prolonged delays connecting to the National Grid, a development that threatens to undermine the country’s own net zero targets.
What regulation could look like
Amsterdam demonstrates that democratic control of data centre geography is achievable and that the industry can survive it. In 2019, the city announced an immediate halt to all new data centre development, citing grid capacity and spatial pressure. When the moratorium ended, it was replaced with a structured framework: strict energy efficiency thresholds, a cap of 10 hectares or 70 MW for any new facility in the region, and designated zones for larger builds have been established in the north of the country.
Ireland’s story is more cautionary. With data centres consuming approximately 21 per cent of national electricity demand, grid regulators imposed a de facto moratorium on new connections in Greater Dublin in 2021, driven by energy system security, not community concern. The moratorium was lifted in December 2025, but only with new conditions: facilities must now supply dispatchable electricity back into the national grid and source 80 per cent of demand from renewables within six years.
Then, in April 2026, an investigation by Investigate Europe, published with The Guardian, Le Monde, and El País, revealed that Microsoft and the DigitalEurope lobby group had successfully inserted a secrecy clause into EU law, classifying individual data centres’ energy and water consumption figures as commercially confidential and blocking public access. This clause likely violates the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, with the result that communities facing proposed developments across the EU cannot access basic facts about what those facilities will consume.
A global pattern
The United States has seen the most organised resistance, with local opposition groups blocking or delaying data centre projects worth approximately $64billion. In Peculiar, Missouri, residents formed a group called ‘Don’t Dump Data in Peculiar’ and successfully lobbied their Planning Commission to remove data centres from the town’s zoning ordinance entirely.
In Virginia, which processes approximately 70 per cent of global internet traffic, 42 activist groups are now campaigning against a development dynamic that the Trump administration has placed beyond most normal regulatory reach. The scale of what is being proposed elsewhere illustrates why: a recently approved data centre in Utah will cover more than 40,000 acres, twice the size of Manhattan, and require more power than the entire state currently consumes, having been approved despite nearly 4,000 public objections.
Singapore offers the most instructive model for what strategic, community-aware planning can look like. A moratorium imposed in 2019 was lifted in 2022 only after strict sustainability requirements were introduced, and a carefully calibrated Green Data Centre Roadmap now governs all new approvals. Malaysia, by contrast, has followed a growth-first path. Johor alone grew from approximately 10 MW of data centre capacity in 2021 to over 400 MW by late 2024, with governance structures struggling to keep pace.
The most viscerally political resistance is in Latin America. In Uruguay, protesters against Google’s data centre in Canelones adopted the slogan: ‘No es sequía, es saqueo’, it’s not drought, it’s pillage. They had been forced to go to court simply to learn how much water the facility would consume – the answer they won was 7.6 million litres per day. In Chile, residents of Santiago voted in a local referendum against a Google expansion, alarmed by a planned water draw of 169 litres per second during a severe regional drought. Courts initially revoked the licence. An investigation later revealed the Chilean government had quietly allowed data centre developers to bypass environmental impact assessments through an administrative decision never made public.
Across the world, national governments are designating data centre expansion as a strategic priority. Planning processes are accelerated or removed from local democratic control, and the communities most directly affected by the environmental consequences, water consumption, grid strain, noise, thermal effects, are given the least time, information, and legal standing to participate meaningfully. When they resist, they typically win procedural concessions, not a pause to construction.
The question that remains
Back in Buckinghamshire, the government’s admitted error will likely result in a fresh planning process, one that, this time, properly accounts for environmental impact. Whether it changes the outcome is another matter. A better process does not automatically produce better decisions when the structural incentives remain unchanged.
What Amsterdam showed, and what Singapore’s Green Data Centres Roadmap suggests, is that the choice is not between data centres and no data centres. It is between data centre development that is shaped by democratic processes, and development that treats those processes as obstacles to be cleared. Every community is currently fighting a planning battle for the right to be consulted, for a genuine seat at the table before the concrete is poured. That is not a radical demand. It is what planning systems were built to provide.
