Business

Five years is a long time in the datacentre business. FT columnist John Dizard, writing in December 2020, said that despite the screams of “mobs of competition lawyers, politicians and impoverished small traders” directed at datacentre owners “from beyond the muddy fence lines outside Slough, Yvelines or Schiphol Rijk”, these owners would be comforted by the “soft beeps signalling closing bank balances and the murmurs of their tax advisers”. By late 2020, the world had been living with Covid for a year, and while business IT spend had declined, cloud, hosted in those “featureless, humming” buildings, was on a tear, seeing decades worth of growth in single years. And nowhere in the column is any mention made of AI, its detonation then two years distant. At the end of 2020, Nvidia’s stock was at $13.02. In mid-September 2025, it was at $177, valuing the company at around $4trn. As for Dizard’s derisory comment about the screaming from the fences, he was referring to protests by environmentalists, which seemingly didn’t gain much traction at the time.

Data Center Watch reports that around $18bn worth of datacentre projects in the US have been blocked following opposition from the communities in which they were going to be built. As the organisation says, datacentres have become the “new Nimby” flashpoint, with concerns around power and water use, property values and noise.