Closed loops, open questions: Burnham’s data centre challenge

As the UK looks towards its fifth major heatwave of the summer, data centres reach a similar boiling point as a contested part of the country’s infrastructure debate. What was once discussed primarily through the language of digital growth and grid capacity is now being reframed through a more immediate set of public concerns: drought, water use, housing pressure, local disruption and whether communities feel any meaningful benefit from the infrastructure being built around them. 

The terrain in front of Andy Burnham is a fascinating one. Public services, cloud computing and AI growth all depend on significantly greater computing capacity, while the UK's ambition to avoid becoming merely a consumer of technologies developed elsewhere demands physical infrastructure, not just policy statements. Yet the machinery required to deliver that ambition is itself becoming more politically and publicly contested. 

The abolition of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) has created a more fragmented picture for digital infrastructure. AI strategy and public sector AI adoption now appear to sit closer to the centre of government, with an AI Minister attending Cabinet and a new taskforce housed within the Office of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. Elsewhere, digital transformation, digital inclusion, online harms and the Government Digital Service have moved into the Department for Culture, Media and Sport; while science, innovation and elements of the industrial agenda have been absorbed into the expanded business department. In principle, that could embed technology more deeply across government. In practice, it also creates a coordination challenge at precisely the moment the UK needs greater clarity on planning, power, investment and delivery.  

That uncertainty is key given Burnham inherits a sector where the political context is becoming more difficult just as delivery needs to accelerate. Recent disputes have added further pressure to a debate already shaped by claims about water-guzzling facilities, heat, power demand and local infrastructure strain. Some of those claims are simplified, and in some cases risk importing assumptions from other markets into a UK context where modern facilities can be designed with closed-loop cooling systems, lower water demand and increasingly sophisticated approaches to energy efficiency. Yet factual precision is not always a requirement for political traction, particularly when arguments align with wider public anxieties about digital growth and who ultimately benefits from it. 

That is where Burnham’s own politics cuts both ways. The Manchesterism model places emphasis on agency and visible reward: who benefits, who decides, and who sees the value of growth. Applied to data centres, that creates a higher test than national need alone. Communities are unlikely to be persuaded by broader references to AI sovereignty if their lived concerns centre on water resilience, noise, heat, land use or whether housing and local services are being squeezed by infrastructure they do not fully understand the benefits of. 

The route through this is not to retreat from data centres, but to make a clearer case for what good development looks like. That means being specific about sustainable design, future energy models, firm clean power, grid flexibility, heat reuse, local skills and tangible community benefit. It also means recognising that the strongest arguments for the sector will not be claims about AI alone, but practical explanations of how individual projects manage impacts and contribute to the places that host them. 

For Burnham then, the challenge is to ensure data centres are not seen as infrastructure whose benefits are felt elsewhere, but as part of a place-based growth agenda that can support resilience and yield local value.