Exclusive: Campaigners complain no environmental assessment made for 90MW Buckinghamshire facility
The deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner, has been hit with a legal challenge after she overruled a local council to approve a hyperscale datacentre on green belt land by the M25 in Buckinghamshire.
Campaigners bringing the action are complaining that no environmental impact assessment was made for the 90MW datacentre, which was approved as part of the Labour government’s push to turn the UK into an AI powerhouse by trebling computing capacity to meet rising demand amid what it terms “a global race” as AI usage takes off.
The home counties datacentre is relatively small compared with one planned in north Lincolnshire that will have about 10 times the capacity, and is dwarfed by one planned by Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg in Louisiana, which will be more than 50 times larger as he seeks to achieve digital “superintelligence”.
But Foxglove, the tech equity campaign group bringing the legal challenge alongside the environmental charity Global Action Plan, said the energy demand could push up local electricity prices and said it was “baffling” that the government had not carried out an environmental assessment.
