TL;DR

Project data from Barbour ABI, analysed by Computer Weekly, shows 173 datacentre schemes now sitting inside the UK planning system with combined capacity above 14.6GW. Six months earlier the equivalent count was 114 projects and about 10GW. A further 24 announced-but-unsubmitted schemes carry 4.4GW behind them, taking the total heading towards the grid to roughly 19GW. The geography is the part worth reading twice: southern England still wins on project count, but the genuinely enormous campuses are landing further north.

Volume in the south, scale in the north

The London and M4 corridor region holds 82 of those schemes and 5.2GW, comfortably the largest single market and the one that gained most capacity outright. Yet its typical project runs at 77MW. Compare the North East, where nine schemes average 228MW apiece, or Scotland, whose 14 average 184MW. The M62 corridor sits between the two at 128MW across 23 projects. The Midlands is barely in the race, with just four schemes and 66MW between them.

Scotland moved faster than anywhere else, climbing from four projects and 0.9GW in March to 14 and 2.4GW by September. What draws developers there is a combination of large brownfield plots — retired generating stations, old industrial land — and the heavy transmission infrastructure already attached to them.

Computer Weekly is candid that its totals are a floor rather than a ceiling. Where Barbour ABI publishes no megawatt figure, capacity is modelled from floor area; the smallest edge and healthcare sites carry no estimate whatsoever. Its March baseline was restated upwards under the improved method, so the six-month comparison stays like-for-like.

Looking forward

The pre-planning entry worth watching sits at Cottam in Nottinghamshire, where a decommissioned coal station is lined up for a gigawatt of capacity — and not because of the small modular reactors meant to run it. Holtec’s SMR-300 design only cleared its Generic Design Assessment in March, which puts first nuclear output around 2030, later than the facility it is supposed to serve. Until then it competes for grid connections like everything else.

That single site contains the whole tension. Consents are accumulating faster than generation, which is why Verdant’s challenge to the sector’s employment claims has landed so hard this week, and why Scotland’s 6,000MW of hyperscale proposals has turned into a political question rather than a planning one.