| Data centres are being built across the UK at extraordinary speed. Big Tech companies building them claim that data centres bring jobs and economic growth. But Foxglove has spent the last two years testing these claims – including in the courts.
We’ve helped expose how the jobs promises are often far-fetched and fail to materialise. And we’ve shown how the UK’s dash to build data centres is undermining climate targets, stretching water supplies, and riding roughshod over the wishes of local communities.
At 1:15pm on Thursday 25 June, as part of London Climate Action Week, we’re bringing some key figures involved in this fight together in one room – and I’d like to invite you to be there in person.
Foxglove is hosting a panel discussion – Data Centres: Powering AI or costing the earth? – in Victoria, Central London. We’re aiming for 45 minutes of conversation between lawyers, an economist, a frontline organiser and an influential member of parliament, followed by 45 minutes of questions from you.
Central to the discussion: who actually benefits from data centres, beyond a handful of the world’s richest companies? And who’s left to pick up the cost?
These aren’t abstract questions for us. Since we started working on data centres in 2024, Foxglove has won the UK’s first legal case challenging a hyperscale data centre on the grounds that the government had failed to assess its environmental impact. We exposed a data centre in Northumberland that would pump out more carbon emissions than Birmingham Airport. And we helped push Edinburgh Council to reject proposals for a data centre on environmental grounds.
And we’re not just fighting in the UK. This year, alongside the Housing Assembly, a movement of more than 20 communities in South Africa’s Western Cape, and supported by Legal Resource Centre, we’ve filed legal objections to a hyperscale data centre in Cape Town being pushed through without any significant details of its water, power and environmental impact.
At next week’s event we’ll explore what a realistic and sustainable plan for AI infrastructure could look like – one that doesn’t blow a hole in our plans to combat climate catastrophe, nor threaten our critical supplies of water and power – what real regulation would require, and how we can force governments and regulators to take action now.
I’ll be chairing the discussion as Foxglove’s co-executive director. Joining me will be a brilliant panel including:
- James Meadway – economist and co-director of the environmental think tank Verdant, former chief economist at the New Economics Foundation, host of the weekly Macrodose podcast, with a book on AI and economic growth out with Penguin late next year.
- A UK parliamentarian (tbc)
- Our partners in this work at Housing Assembly, Legal Resource Centre and Global Action Plan.
We hope to confirm some additional speakers in the coming days.
All the details:
- What: Data Centres: Powering AI or costing the earth? – panel discussion plus audience Q&A
- When: Thursday 25 June, 1:15pm – 2:45pm
- Where: Fivefields, 8-10 Grosvenor Gardens, London SW1W 0DH – a two-minute walk from Victoria station, in a step-free, fully accessible building
- Part of: London Climate Action Week 2026
Tickets are free, but space is limited, so if you’d like to join us, please RSVP here:
The decisions being made about data centres in the next year will shape the next decade. So please come and be part of working out what we do about it. And if you can’t make it to London – don’t worry, this campaign isn’t going anywhere, and there’ll be plenty of ways to be involved. There’ll be more to come.
Hope to see you at the event!
Martha
Martha Dark
Co-Executive Director, Foxglove
P.S. If you do want to come, please book sooner rather than later – the room only holds about 100, and we expect it to fill: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/data-centres-powering-ai-or-costing-the-earth-tickets-1991786511072
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The New Dark Age 
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