Havering Friends of the Earth

Blind faith in "progress"

by Ian Pirie; first published 14-Nov-2025

Data centres can be enormous buildings - John Robinson

We hope that the residents of Havering are aware that a huge data centre (claimed to be the biggest in Europe) is planned – if the council leadership gets its way – to be built on farmland in North Ockendon.

To put this in context: there is currently an extraordinary "boom" in the number of data centres worldwide: there are some 11,000 worldwide, and the number has grown by 500% in the last twenty years (Dan Milmo, Guardian 3rd Nov.). Together, they will use an amount of electricity that is equivalent to a third of all the power used in the UK!

All sorts of challenges and questions arise from this "boom". What's behind it? Where is the money coming from? Who really benefits? Will it all collapse in a crash? There isn't the space here to answer all these questions – but the fact that some of the companies running data centres are the richest in the world should give us pause for thought. (Nvidia is now worth a record $5 trillion!).

The main thing driving this expansion is, I believe, a blind faith in "progress". Much of this progress is supposed to come from AI. Yet we do not know for sure whether AI will do as much as its advocates promise. We do not know if it will cause more harm than good in the long term.

The present costs of this boom can be seen, much as costs were seen during the industrial revolution: shortages of electricity and of water, that have affected different places across the world; workers mining for the rare metals used in chips suffering poverty and dangers to life and limb; houses dwarfed by enormous warehouses.

We can see blind faith, locally and elsewhere, in the promises of "thousands of jobs" – when it takes a very small number of people to run a data centre. We can see it in a disregard for the value of the countryside – farmland that is producing crops is described as "poor", and green belt land is damaged. We can see it when we ask: what does Havering need a data centre for? How would the residents of the east of our borough benefit, when we are subject to ten years of construction traffic, noise and pollution just to build it?

There will be a public consultation on the data centre soon. Please don't be persuaded by "blind faith."