Estimate of Data Centre Capacity: Great Britain 2024
Published 1 May 2025
Applies to England, Scotland and Wales
© Crown copyright 2025
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1. Parliamentary Question (PQ)
Lord Elliott of Mickle Fell: To ask His Majesty’s Government what is UK data centre capacity, as measured in megawatts, by region.
2. Methodology
The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) has an internal dataset containing information on colocation data centres (a facility where multiple organisations rent space for their servers and other computing hardware), including estimates of their Information Technology (IT) capacities in megawatts (MW) and their locations. The data was collected in 2024 via a combination of publicly available sources (e.g. Telegeography’s database and press releases) and industry engagement (including industry bodies such as Tech UK and individual operators following ongoing policy engagement), and estimates of megawatt capacity made via internal modelling (based on various metrics such as rack densities and floor area). It does not include enterprise data centres (facilities operated by businesses other than data centre operators for the purposes of their own business). This data is commercially sensitive and has not been published, except in the aggregated form in the table in the PQ response below.
In the answer to the Parliamentary Question, Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics level 1 (NUTS 1) regions were used, which are identical to International Territorial Level 1 (ITL 1) regions. A map was used to identify which region each data centre is in. The IT capacity was then summed by region, and the totals rounded to the nearest whole number to reduce identifiability and to minimise any potential spuriousness in the precision, given that the underlying figures are predominantly estimates.
3. PQ answer
The answer to this Parliamentary Question was first published on 11 March 2025 and is copied below:
The Government has not historically collected figures on the growth of data centre capacity but has monitored the market periodically and through industry engagement. Other sources for this historical data are available, through Tech UK or CBRE’s market outlooks for example.
The Government’s estimate of GB’s data centre capacity, defined as the maximum rated IT load of colocation data centres, is broken down by region in a table below. This is estimated as of autumn 2024.
| NUTS1 (ITL1) Region | IT power (MW) |
|---|---|
| North East | 17 |
| North West | 52 |
| Yorkshire and the Humber | 16 |
| East Midlands | 9 |
| West Midlands | 15 |
| East | 44 |
| London | 1,048 |
| South East | 128 |
| South West | 53 |
| Wales | 154 |
| Scotland | 30 |
Total IT power: 1.6 gigawatts (GW)