Whitehall wants to triple their number in the UK. Yet in Slough, I saw the impact they’re having on communities

Amid headlines about the UK’s drought, Europe’s wildfires and impossible global temperatures, it was 28C when I arrived in Slough last Monday. I was there to look around Slough Trading Estate, a place that might once have conjured up images of the TV comedy The Office, many of whose laughs came at the expense of this overgrown patch of suburbia, 20-odd miles west of London.

But these days, this area of town – an incongruous mixture of old-school businesses such as Mr Clutch and Angling Direct, and vast, metal-clad leviathans that look like something pulled from JG Ballard – has become a byword for the constant expansion of datacentres, those hulking symbols of the vast computing power that big tech now requires, not least because of the ever-more complex workings of artificial intelligence.

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