Last Updated on July 1, 2026 by Karl Thompson
If someone asked you to name Britain’s most important industrial town, Slough probably wouldn’t be high on your list.
It isn’t famous for steel. It doesn’t build ships or manufacture cars, and it has none of the iconic smokestacks that once symbolised Britain’s industrial might. To most people, Slough is simply another commuter town on the western edge of London.
Yet behind anonymous warehouses and heavily secured compounds, something remarkable is happening.
Slough has quietly become home to Europe’s largest concentration of commercial data centres, a distinction highlighted in Oxford Economics’ report The UK’s Data Centre Boom: Growth Trends, Drivers and the Rising Power Challenge. Depending on how facilities are counted, around 35–40 major data centres operate in and around the town, representing roughly one gigawatt (1 GW) of installed IT capacity. To put that into perspective, that is roughly equivalent to the output of a large power station—enough electricity to power hundreds of thousands of homes. Instead of lighting houses or running factories, however, much of that energy is devoted to performing calculations.
That is because data centres have become one of the defining infrastructures of the twenty-first century. They are, in effect, the factories of the digital age.
Slough’s remarkable transformation is explored in Data Centre Magazine’s feature How Slough Became a Data Centre Powerhouse.
What Are Data Centres?
Most people use cloud computing dozens of times every day without giving it a second thought. Every email, streamed film, online purchase, AI conversation and digital bank transfer depends upon computers somewhere else doing the work on our behalf.
The phrase the cloud, however, is rather misleading. It suggests something light, invisible and almost magical. In reality, there is nothing ephemeral about a data centre. It is a large industrial building whose purpose is to process, store and move information rather than manufacture physical goods.
Walk inside one and you won’t find production lines or factory workers. Instead you’ll see long rows of black server cabinets stretching into the distance, each containing dozens of powerful computers connected by kilometres of fibre-optic cable. Above them sit industrial-scale cooling systems removing the enormous heat generated by processors working around the clock. Beneath the raised floors run thick power cables connected to banks of batteries capable of keeping the building alive if the electricity supply fails, while outside stand diesel generators ready to start within seconds should the National Grid experience an outage.
The infrastructure is undeniably physical—steel, concrete, copper, silicon and electricity—yet these buildings produce nothing you can hold in your hand. Everything inside exists for a single purpose: uninterrupted computation.
Their raw materials are electricity, silicon chips and data. Their output is computation.
That computation powers much of modern life, including:
- Google searches
- AI conversations
- online banking
- streamed television and films
- NHS patient records
- Microsoft Teams meetings
- cloud storage
- online shopping
- business software
- social media
Every second, billions of calculations are performed on behalf of millions of people who have little idea where those calculations actually take place.
Like electricity, data centres are almost invisible until something goes wrong. When a cloud service crashes, payments fail or an AI system goes offline, we briefly catch sight of the hidden machinery that keeps society running before it quietly disappears from view once more.
The description of a modern data centre in this section is based largely on the Uptime Institute’s Annual Global Data Centre Survey together with Beck & Pollitzer’s guide What is a Data Centre?
Why Is Slough Britain’s Digital Factory Town?
If there is one place that symbolises Britain’s digital economy, it is not London.
It is Slough.
Mention Slough and many people think of business parks, motorways or perhaps the television comedy The Office. Few would describe it as one of the most strategically important places in Europe. Yet behind anonymous warehouses and heavily secured compounds, something extraordinary has emerged.
Slough has quietly become home to Europe’s largest concentration of commercial data centres. Depending on how facilities are counted, around 35–40 major data centres operate in and around the town, representing approximately one gigawatt (1 GW) of installed IT capacity.
One gigawatt is roughly the output of a large power station—enough electricity to power hundreds of thousands of homes. Instead of lighting homes or running washing machines, however, much of that energy is devoted to performing calculations. Millions of them, every second.
Many of the buildings themselves are deliberately unremarkable. They have blank walls, security fencing, few windows and almost no outward indication of what happens inside. Yet behind those anonymous facades sits computing power that supports businesses, governments and public services across Britain and far beyond.
The location is no accident.
Slough lies immediately west of London, close to Heathrow Airport and one of Europe’s densest fibre-optic networks. As the House of Commons Library’s briefing on UK data-centre infrastructure explains, this combination has made it one of Britain’s most attractive locations for digital infrastructure.
Slough benefits from excellent transport links, robust electricity infrastructure and exceptionally fast digital connections to London’s financial district. These advantages have made it one of the best-connected places in Britain for digital infrastructure.
Once a handful of companies established facilities there, others quickly followed. Industrial clusters have always developed this way.
During the Industrial Revolution, textile mills clustered around rivers, canals and coalfields because that was where the energy and transport infrastructure existed. Today, data centres cluster around electricity substations and fibre-optic networks for exactly the same reason.
Infrastructure attracts more infrastructure.
Slough is therefore no accident of geography. It is the product of a new industrial logic, one in which access to electricity and digital connectivity has become as important as coalfields and canals once were.
Slough has become the Manchester of the digital age, most people simply haven’t realised it yet.
Where are Britain’s Data Centres?
Slough is the most dramatic example, but it is far from unique.
Britain now hosts hundreds of data centres, as shown by Cloudscene’s UK Data Centre Directory.
Britain’s data centres range from relatively small enterprise facilities to enormous hyperscale campuses built to support cloud computing and artificial intelligence. Major clusters are found across the Thames Valley, London, Manchester, South Wales, Birmingham, Scotland and the Oxford-Cambridge corridor.
The map in Figure 1.3 reveals something most of us never consider.
Britain’s digital economy has a geography.
Data centres are not randomly scattered around the country. They appear where four critical forms of infrastructure come together:
- abundant electricity
- high-capacity fibre-optic networks
- reliable transport connections
- suitable industrial land.
Increasingly they also require access to electricity on a scale previously associated with heavy industry. As artificial intelligence expands, electrical capacity has become one of the principal constraints on digital growth, with some proposed developments waiting years for grid connections.
Recognising this, the British government has begun establishing AI Growth Zones, outlined in its Delivering AI Growth Zones policy paper., designed to accelerate planning decisions and improve electricity connections for new AI infrastructure. In much the same way that governments once competed to attract factories, ports and railways, they now compete to attract data centres, cloud providers and computational capacity.
This marks an important shift in the way governments think about economic development.
For more than a century, industrial policy focused on attracting manufacturers. Today, governments increasingly compete for something much less visible: computation. The factories may have changed, but the competition to host them remains remarkably familiar.
Who Owns Britain’s Digital Infrastructure?
The growth of data centres raises a question that is technological on the surface but fundamentally sociological:
Who owns the infrastructure that modern Britain increasingly depends upon?
For much of the twentieth century, there was a widespread assumption that infrastructure of national importance should be owned, or at least closely controlled, by the state or public utilities. Electricity grids, railways, water supplies and telecommunications were generally regarded as too important to leave entirely to the market.
Britain’s digital infrastructure tells a rather different story.
The largest data-centre operators in the UK include companies such as Equinix, Digital Realty, CyrusOne, Vantage Data Centers, Iron Mountain Data Centers, Virtus Data Centres and Colt Technology Services. (Information on the UK’s largest operators is drawn from the Equinix Annual Report and Digital Realty Annual Report)
These names mean little to most people, yet they provide the physical infrastructure upon which some of the world’s best-known organisations depend.
Their customers include:
- Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- Microsoft Azure
- Google Cloud
- Oracle
- government departments
- NHS organisations
- banks
- universities
- media companies
- AI developers
Most people will never hear of Equinix or Digital Realty, but millions use services running on their infrastructure every day. Every online payment, streamed programme, cloud document or AI conversation depends upon data centres owned or operated by companies like these.
Perhaps the most striking feature is not simply that these companies are private.
It is that many of them are American.
Equinix is headquartered in California. Digital Realty is based in Texas, while Vantage Data Centers is headquartered in Colorado. The three dominant cloud providers—Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud—also dominate the global cloud market, according to Synergy Research Group’s Cloud Market Share Report. They are all American companies.
This means that an increasing share of Britain’s digital infrastructure is owned, financed and controlled by multinational corporations headquartered thousands of miles away.
That is not necessarily a problem. These companies have invested billions of pounds in infrastructure that governments might otherwise have struggled to provide, and their scale allows them to deliver highly reliable computing services to businesses and public organisations across the world.
Nevertheless, it represents a profound shift in the relationship between the state, markets and infrastructure.
The railways, electricity network and telephone system were once widely regarded as strategic national assets. Today, many of the systems that underpin everyday life—from cloud computing to artificial intelligence—depend upon infrastructure owned by global technology companies rather than national governments.
These questions echo themes explored by Manuel Castells in The Rise of the Network Society
- Should the infrastructure upon which society increasingly depends be owned by multinational corporations?
- Does it matter if much of Britain’s digital backbone is ultimately controlled by companies headquartered overseas?
- How much influence should governments have over infrastructure that is essential to public services but privately owned?
These are not simply technical or economic questions.
They are questions about power.
Data Centres are the New Factories
Data centres are often described as warehouses full of computers, but that description misses their historical significance.
They are factories.
The difference is not that factories have disappeared, but that what they produce has changed.
The great factories of the nineteenth century transformed coal, cotton and iron into manufactured goods through the labour of thousands of workers. Steam engines powered machinery, and communities grew around mills that employed generations of local families.
Historians such as Lewis Mumford and Thomas P. Hughes have argued that each technological revolution creates new infrastructures that reshape society, and today’s data centres operate very differently to those of the 19th century. Their raw material is electricity, their product is computation and their workforce is comparatively small.
A Victorian textile mill might employ several thousand workers. A modern hyperscale data centre may employ only a few hundred people once operational, despite supporting millions of users and billions of pounds of economic activity.
The contrast can be summarised like this:
| Nineteenth-Century Factory | Twenty-First-Century Data Centre |
| Coal | Electricity |
| Cotton or iron | Data |
| Steam engines | Servers and processors |
| Thousands of workers | Hundreds of engineers and technicians |
| Manufactured goods | Computation |
| Local markets | Global digital networks |
The relationship between production and labour has changed fundamentally.
Economic value is increasingly created through software, automation and computation rather than manual work. Productivity no longer depends primarily on employing more workers, but on processing more information.
The factory has not disappeared.
It has evolved.
Slough: The New Manchester
During the Industrial Revolution, Manchester became the symbolic capital of a new economic age. Its textile mills transformed coal, cotton and human labour into industrial wealth, while their chimneys dominated the skyline and announced the arrival of industrial society.
Slough may come to play a similar symbolic role in the twenty-first century.
- Instead of cotton mills, it has data centres.
- Instead of steam engines, it has servers.
- Instead of coal, it runs on electricity.
- Instead of producing cloth, it produces computation.
The comparison is not perfect, but it is revealing.
Manchester symbolised the infrastructure of the Industrial Revolution. Slough symbolises the infrastructure of the digital revolution. Both illustrate the technologies upon which an entire economic system depends, even if most people rarely think about them.
The difference is that Victorian factories were impossible to ignore. They dominated towns and cities, employed thousands of workers and visibly transformed the landscape. Data centres, by contrast, hide behind blank walls on anonymous industrial estates. They employ relatively few people, produce no visible goods and attract little public attention.
Yet their importance is no less profound.
Millions of people depend upon them every day without ever knowing where they are or who owns them.
That is precisely why Slough matters. Not because it is unique, but because it reveals something that is normally hidden. It reminds us that the foundations of society have not disappeared.They have simply become harder to see.
The Hidden Infrastructure of Society
Data centres are only one layer of the hidden society.
Most people experience only the surface of the digital world. They open a banking app, join a Teams meeting, stream a film, upload photographs or ask an AI assistant a question. These activities feel almost effortless, as though they happen in an abstract digital space detached from the physical world.
The reality is very different.
Every digital action depends upon an intricate chain of physical infrastructure stretching far beyond the screen in front of us. Electricity flows through the National Grid into data centres. Fibre-optic cables connect those data centres to one another and to the wider internet. Cloud platforms distribute computing power across continents, while payment networks, satellites and undersea cables allow information to move around the world in fractions of a second.
Each layer depends upon the one beneath it.
When all of these systems work together, they become almost invisible. We simply experience the convenience of modern life. It is only when one layer fails—a power cut, a severed fibre cable, a cloud outage or a payment-system crash—that we suddenly become aware of the hidden architecture supporting our everyday lives.
This is the central argument of this blog post which draws on the thinking of C. Wright Mills’ “The Sociological Imagination“….
Modern society is no longer held together solely by visible institutions such as schools, hospitals, factories and government departments. Increasingly, it depends upon hidden infrastructures that most people never see but use every single day.
In the nineteenth century those structures included factories, railways and coalfields.
In the twenty-first century they include data centres, fibre-optic cables, cloud computing, satellites, semiconductor supply chains and artificial intelligence.
The hidden society is not a metaphor: it is physical, it is measurable, and it is all around us.
In the posts that follow, we will uncover the rest of it.
Next we leave the factory behind and follow the cables that connect it to the rest of the world.
Find out More (Forthcoming posts)
- What Is Cloud Computing?
- Why AI Needs So Much Electricity
- Who Owns Britain’s Digital Infrastructure?
- Why Slough Became Europe’s Data Centre Capital
- How Fibre-Optic Cables Carry the Internet
- What Happens Inside a Data Centre?
Classic Reading
- Susan Leigh Star – The Ethnography of Infrastructure
https://ics.uci.edu/~wscacchi/GameLab/Recommended%20Readings/ethnography-infrastructure-Star-1999.pdf - Manuel Castells – The Rise of the Network Society
- Langdon Winner – Do Artifacts Have Politics?
- Lewis Mumford – Technics and Civilization
- Thomas P. Hughes – Networks of Power
- C. Wright Mills – The Sociological Imagination