The New Dark Age

Friday, 10 October 2025 — Foxglove

As part of Foxglove’s work to sound the alarm on the environmental impact of Big Tech’s dash to cover the UK in data centres, we’ve published some new analysis of data centres’ impact on the UK’s efforts to cut carbon emissions.

The Foxglove analysis, covered in last Sunday’s Observer newspaper, showed that just TEN of these new data centres will belch out enough polluting carbon emissions to cancel out ALL of the carbon emissions saved in 2025 by UK drivers switching to electric cars.

Foxglove researchers looked at data from developers’ own documents. We found that just ten of the largest data centres currently in planning or construction will, according to the developers’ own figures, cause annual climate emissions equivalent to 2,745,538 tonnes of CO2.

This would all but wipe out the projected 2025 savings from UK drivers making the switch from petrol to electric cars, which the UK Climate Change Committee estimates will total 2.9 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent.

However, we can be pretty sure that the figure of 2.7m tonnes is a significant underestimate.

There are at least as many large data centres planned which have not provided carbon emissions figures, and so we were not able to include these in the total.

On top of that, the figures that actually were provided by developers are also likely to be an underestimate, due to the significant inconsistencies in how they are calculated: some developers’ estimates for similar-sized data centres are 100 times smaller than others’, for example.

So as well as highlighting the potential for data centres to blow up the UK’s efforts to cut emissions, our research flags the dangerous knowledge gaps around the impact of new hyperscale data centres on Britain’s environment.

For example: there is no reliable, overall figure for expected emissions from new data centres available from either government or industry.

This is why our legal challenge of a data centre in Buckinghamshire – where the government pushed the plan through without even conducting a proper environmental impact assessment – is so crucial. Winning that case would throw a spanner in the works of this reckless dash to build Big Tech more data centres, regardless of the environmental consequences.

We’ve hit our first fundraising target now, with £21,260 raised so far. Thank you! Further donations will help pay for staff time to support and publicise the case. So if you haven’t already, please do consider chipping in if you can:
https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/datacentre-challenge/

You can read the article covering our research, in the Observer newspaper, here:
https://observer.co.uk/news/business/article/ten-uk-data-centres-could-cancel-ev-emissions-gain

And our full report is available to download, here:
https://www.foxglove.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/2025_09_26-FINAL-Big-Tech-Data-Centres-Report-Website-Version.pdf

Thank you for all your support – it helps make all this work possible.

Martha

Co-Executive Director