Jamie Robins of the wildlife conservation trust Buglife delivered a letter to Google’s UK headquarters in Kings Cross, London, on Wednesday describing a petition signed by nearly 55,000 people that calls on the company to drop its plan for a large data center in Thurrock, about 15 miles east of London. Robins was joined outside the office by members of the groups opposing the project, who held placards urging Google to search elsewhere for a site. The Thurrock campaign brings together Buglife, local wildlife groups, the nonprofit Foxglove and the Thurrock Hammers motorcycle club. Buglife and the wildlife groups say the development would destroy habitat used by an endangered plant, a rare bumblebee and other invertebrates; Foxglove argues the facility would produce too much pollution; and the motorcycle club wants to race on the site again.
Google obtained the Thurrock plot through a subsidiary in 2023 and applied for permission to build a data center campus there in May last year. The land sits beside a fuel stop where an arterial road meets the highway ringing London, and takes in the remains of Arena Essex, a disused motorcycle racing stadium, along with grassland crossed by old footpaths and a lake. Of roughly 1,000 public responses to the planning authority, only one backed the project, according to the source article; Thurrock Council noted that many responses came from people outside the local area. Opponents contend the proposal does not properly weigh the loss of the raceway, the damage to rare flora and fauna, and as much as 570,000 tonnes of emissions a year, which Foxglove says the UK government’s carbon budget cannot absorb.
Google disputes the grounds for the objections. Adam Elman, the company’s director of sustainability for EMEA, said Google shares the concerns raised by Buglife and others and that the site should be developed sustainably. According to the company, the project would deliver a net gain in biodiversity by keeping habitat and moving endangered plants elsewhere, and would offset emissions by financing new renewable energy generation, with the aim of carbon neutrality by 2030. Google also argues that removing the stadium would not cost the community a valuable facility because the track has been out of use for years, and Elman said the company wants to be a good neighbor and to limit its impact.
The Thurrock demonstration was one of several anti-data center protests in Europe last week. In Amsterdam, protesters climbed a crane at a Microsoft data center site and hung a banner reading “fuck AI.” Robins said local campaign groups opposing data centers are appearing every week, driven by anger over facilities arriving in residents’ back gardens, over local opinion being disregarded and over the effect on wildlife. Mark Sexton, a director at the Thurrock Hammers, said the club objects on different grounds from the other groups, which he believes makes it useful to the wider campaign, and that the unlikely alliance has drawn attention. Rob Pownall, founder of the nonprofit Protect The Wild, who attended Wednesday’s demonstration, said he sees little hope at present but described the action as another chip off a massive ice block.
The UK government is encouraging data center construction as companies race to meet demand for computing power for artificial intelligence models and other digital services, hoping to capture part of the hundreds of billions of dollars flowing into the AI industry and to reduce the country’s reliance on foreign partners for compute. Resistance is also registering in the US, where some states have imposed permitting freezes and data center moratoriums and pro-data center candidates lost heavily in this week’s midterm elections. In the UK, Foxglove recently won a legal challenge that forced the government to withdraw planning permission for a data center west of London. Thurrock Council said it expects to decide on Google’s initial application early next year, after which the company must produce a more detailed development plan subject to another lengthy review. Robins said such planning campaigns can run for years and amount to a war of attrition.
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