“The internet already works. So why do we need another data centre?”

Anyone who has worked with me knows having Radio 2 on in the office is part of my routine. “You've been 40 since you were 14,” one friend kindly put it to me.

I didn't expect an episode of the Jeremy Vine show one lunchtime to provide inspiration for my next blog about data centre PR, but here we are.

There was a debate on the programme recently about the growing number of data centres being built in the UK, and the concerns surrounding them. Power consumption, water usage, enormous buildings appearing on people's doorsteps. The usual suspects.

The industry spokesperson spent much of their (limited) airtime deftly countering those concerns, including explaining why some of the statistics coming out of the US don't necessarily apply to UK facilities. A perfectly reasonable discussion, given these are legitimate questions that deserve proper answers.

One caller, though, raised a point I thought was particularly interesting.

“Why do we need more data centres?”

The segment opened with the familiar explanation of why data centres are essential. Without them, “we wouldn't be able to use online banking, watch Netflix, go online shopping” etc etc.

All true. Except, to the average person listening to Radio 2, the internet already works. They watched Netflix last night, checked their bank balance this morning and have an Amazon parcel arriving tomorrow.

So why does their town need another building full of servers?

Two very different conversations

Spend any time reading specialist publications like DatacenterDynamics or Data Centre Review and you'll find informed, detailed reporting about the industry's challenges. Power availability, resilience, cooling technologies, grid connections, AI workloads and the differences between types of facilities are all regular subjects.

Move into mainstream or national media and that context can quickly disappear.

A story about a massive AI training campus in the US can influence how people perceive a conventional colocation facility in the UK. Suddenly, every data centre is an 'AI data centre', complete with the environmental concerns associated with the biggest developments and fears of an impending AI-pocalypse. An understandably tempting narrative button to push, but one the DC community doesn’t always get a fair shake at countering.

The industry needs to do a much better job of challenging that assumption. Not every new data centre is being built for AI, and even those supporting AI workloads can differ enormously in scale and design. If we allow every new development to be portrayed as some vast AI training facility, we can hardly be surprised when people start questioning whether they're needed.

Water usage is a particularly good example.

Much of the negative reporting originates in the US, where climate conditions, cooling approaches and environmental policies can be very different. Yet the same concerns are often applied to the UK without much distinction.

A techUK survey conducted with the Environment Agency found that 51% of the 73 English data centre sites surveyed used waterless cooling. Separate research commissioned by MOSL estimated that data centres account for around 0.2% of England's non-household water consumption.

Those figures don't make the environmental debate disappear, nor should they. Water and electricity consumption remain genuine considerations, particularly as facilities grow larger and demand increases.

That said, the industry has every right to push back when the facts are being misrepresented, and it needs to fight for the airtime to do so.

I do wonder, though, whether we're getting so caught up in explaining why data centres aren't quite as environmentally damaging as people might think that we're forgetting to explain why we need them in the first place.

Why more?

There's a fairly obvious starting point. We're all spending an extraordinary amount of time online, and asking more of the infrastructure supporting us.

We're streaming more, storing more, uploading more and connecting more devices. Younger generations are growing up with digital services woven into practically everything they do. Even without the AI boom, our demand for digital infrastructure isn't going to stand still. AI is adding another layer of demand, rather than being the sole reason we're building more data centres.

The internet might already work, but we're hardly standing still in how we use it.

That's before getting into the differences between the infrastructure needed for today's cloud services and the increasingly demanding workloads of tomorrow.

There's a more positive story to tell about why capacity needs to grow. It doesn't mean every proposed development is automatically justified, or that concerns about local infrastructure and environmental impact should be brushed aside.

Yet those conversations shouldn't be taking place in isolation from the question of why we're building in the first place.

For those of us working in specialist B2B communications, there's an interesting challenge here.

A data centre company can be getting excellent coverage in the trade press, telling a technically compelling story and engaging successfully with the industry, while the wider public is hearing something quite different.

Not every operator needs to be chasing national headlines. They do, however, need to think about how their arguments translate to audiences who don't know their hyperscale from their colocation, and who might reasonably wonder why yet another facility is necessary. Part of that job is explaining what their facilities actually do, rather than allowing the public to assume they're all being built to power ChatGPT.

The Instagram irony

ITV recently reported on data centre developments in Slough, subsequently sharing a clip on Instagram.

The comments were full of people questioning why we need these facilities at all.

There's a certain irony in people using Instagram to question the need for data centres, given that the platform itself relies on them to function. Every photo uploaded, video watched and comment posted is another small example of the demand we're placing on digital infrastructure.

Of course, that doesn't mean people should be chuffed about a new data centre being built down the road just because they use Instagram.

It does, though, highlight something the industry needs to get much better at communicating.

We've become very good at explaining the infrastructure behind the internet we already have. Now we need to get better at explaining why our ever-growing appetite for being online means we're going to need more of it.