The New Dark Age

Thursday, 23 April 2026 — Foxglove

Our latest legal action has set a brand new precedent for hyperscale data centres – that environmental protections promised by developers must now be legally binding.

Data centre developers are used to telling us their facilities will be ‘green’ or run on ‘low carbon energy’ without putting any real commitments into place. But now, our legal action has set a new precedent that their claims will have to be concrete and enforceable via contracts with local councils – rather than empty and soon-forgotten green-washing PR.

This is an important moment in our continuing fight to protect the environment from Big Tech.

Our legal action was the first ever against a ‘hyperscale’ data centre in the UK, and it was funded directly by donations from Foxglove supporters.

We took on the proposed Woodlands data centre in Buckinghamshire and achieved an incredible result – not only an admission from the UK government that it made a “serious error” in pushing through a climate-polluting data centre, but also a significant precedent for the building of future data centres.

It shows that when we stand up together to challenge Big Tech, we can have a huge impact. But our work is far from over.

There is still a vast number of ‘hyperscale’ data centres in the planning system. If they are built, they will double the amount of electricity consumed by the UK – with terrible consequences for our efforts to prevent catastrophic climate damage.

To stop that from happening, we need real action from the government to put this new precedent into policies ensuring that all new, large-scale data centres do not cause harm to the environment or our critical supplies of drinking water, or jack up the price of power.

We all use data, and we’re not opposed to all data centres. But we are against unchecked expansion of huge new data centres without a thought for the catastrophic damage they could cause to our environment.

Thanks for being part of it. Much more to come soon.

Tom Hegarty
Head of Communications
Foxglove