For years, Slough has had a reputation among Britons as an unremarkable place, thanks in no small part to the fact it was the setting for smash-hit sitcom The Office, which depicted it as a provincial, parochial backwater.
More recently, however, Slough has become truly noteworthy in its own right. The satellite town is now the world's second largest data centre hub, home to some 40 large-scale facilities.
Many of these data centres sit on a single campus close to the high street, making it very different to the isolated campuses that are often found in China or the US.
The operators of the sites include industry heavyweights Equinix and Digital Realty, while the list of tenants reads like a roll call of Big Tech, with Amazon, Google, Oracle and Microsoft all relying on Slough.
According to some industry estimates, Slough's total data centre load is around 1GW which, for context, is enough electricity to power hundreds of thousands of homes.
