TL;DR:

• UK industrial land suitable for AI data centres — so-called “powered land” — is now selling for £8m-£15m per acre, against £4.5m-£6m for standard London industrial land, as speculators, farmers and developers compete for sites.
• Some 119 UK data centres are in planning per Barbour ABI, on sites ranging from a disused Heathrow retail centre to an old paint factory and a former Travelodge; the National Energy System Operator has identified 140 projects representing 50 GW in its grid queue.
• Only 7% of 61 UK projects tracked by DC Byte since late 2022 are built or under construction, against 46% in Germany and 40% in France — suggesting the bottleneck is grid capacity and power economics, not demand.

Britain’s AI data-centre gold rush has created a two-tier industrial land market, pushed grid-connection wait times out to 12-15 years, and generated what NESO classifies as “zombie projects” clogging up the queue — according to a detailed Reuters investigation drawing on 20-plus interviews across the sector.

What “powered land” now buys

Sembcorp UK’s Wilton International site on Teesside has become an emblem of the new economics. The former petrochemical site has a 240 MW grid connection, on-site gas, biomass and waste-to-energy plants, and spare land left over from the chemical industry’s decline. Sembcorp and developer Digital Reef are pitching hyperscalers on a phased build that could reach 1 GW and imply £15bn of investment over eight to ten years. Sembcorp UK CEO Mike Patrick frames the pitch as regenerative: bringing jobs and investment back to one of Britain’s most economically deprived areas.

The valuation story is stark. Savills estimates London industrial land sells for £4.5m-£6m per acre, but data-centre-suitable land commands £8m-£15m. In the US the multiple is wider still: Colliers reports powered land sells at up to 2.5x other industrial pricing, rising to 3x in northern Virginia and northern California. In the UK, 119 projects are in planning per Barbour ABI, on sites as diverse as a disused car plant, an old paint factory, a former Travelodge and a retail centre near Heathrow. Speculators have entered the market aggressively enough that real estate adviser Bidwells’ Andrew Groves describes demand as having “exploded”.

Why only 7% get built

UK data-centre demand surged 460% in H1 2025 according to the energy department, with 96 GW of high-voltage grid requests filed and another 29 GW for local networks — against total UK generation of around 72 GW. NESO has launched reforms to strip speculative applications from the queue, a move it credits with halving clean-power connection requests last year. But the structural problem remains: of 61 UK projects tracked since late 2022 by DC Byte, 7% are built or under construction, against 46% in Germany, 40% in France and 24% in the US. OpenAI paused a large north-east England data centre this month over energy costs and regulation, and Equinix had to creatively swap a battery-storage connection for a demand connection on a site north of London before its £3.9bn project could proceed.

Looking Forward

For UK AI strategy, the data-centre story is now unambiguously a grid and planning story, not an investment story. The Government’s sovereign AI ambitions, the Sovereign AI Unit’s £500m, and the BT-Nscale 14MW build announced yesterday all assume underlying power infrastructure that may not arrive in time. Expect the next 12 months of policy activity to focus on NESO queue reform, strategic site designation, and direct-generation deals that bypass the national grid — the path Sembcorp and similar powered-land holders are already taking. OpenAI’s pullback is the warning: demand can walk.