Summary
- The proportion of respondents seeing data centres positively fell from 48% in Telehouse’s 2024 research to 37% in the latest survey.
- Concern over electricity consumption increased from 45% to 56%, while 55% regarded negative environmental impact as significant.
- The published results show worsening sentiment but do not provide enough methodological evidence to establish why attitudes changed.
UK public attitudes towards data centres have deteriorated over the past two years even as awareness of the infrastructure has increased, according to new research commissioned by Telehouse.
The survey found that 37% of respondents believed data centres had a positive impact on the digital services they use at home or work, down from 48% in the company’s previous research in 2024.
The proportion taking a negative view increased from 4% to 15%.
Concern about electricity consumption also rose, with 56% worried about the amount of power used by data centres compared with 45% in the earlier research. Some 55% regarded the sector’s negative environmental impact as significant.
At the same time, awareness appears to be improving. The proportion of respondents saying they were unclear about what a data centre is or does fell from 67% to 59%, while awareness of the term itself increased.
The combination complicates a long-standing industry assumption that greater public understanding will necessarily lead to greater support.
Telehouse operates four carrier-neutral facilities in London and argues that the industry needs greater transparency around the services data centres support and the way their environmental impact is managed.
Greater visibility brings harder questions
The shift in sentiment has occurred as data centres have become considerably more visible in UK infrastructure policy.
The sector was designated as critical national infrastructure in 2024, reflecting the dependence of businesses and public services on facilities providing computing, storage, networking, and cloud infrastructure.
Government policy has simultaneously encouraged significant new capacity. The UK Compute Roadmap forecast a need for at least 6GW of AI-capable data centre capacity by 2030, while AI Growth Zones were designed to improve access to power and planning support for very large sites.
Those projects have made the physical requirements of data centres more visible.
A large campus can require high-voltage grid connections, new substations, extensive cooling and heat-rejection systems, backup generation, fibre infrastructure, and significant construction activity.
As proposed sites move into hundreds of megawatts, electricity demand is no longer an engineering detail buried inside a planning application. It becomes part of the local and national discussion over grid capacity and allocation.
Water has created similar scrutiny in locations where evaporative cooling or other water-intensive systems are proposed, particularly during periods when supply resilience is under pressure.
Employment and local economic return have also become contested. Large data centres can employ substantial construction workforces but generally require far fewer permanent staff once operational than industrial facilities of comparable physical scale.
The Telehouse figures should not be used to attribute the change in public opinion to any single one of those issues.
The published survey summary provides the headline results but not enough methodological or longitudinal evidence to demonstrate why sentiment changed between 2024 and 2026.
It nevertheless records a clear association between increasing awareness and rising concern about electricity and environmental impact.
That is relevant to the planning process because the information communities want is becoming more specific.
Explaining that streaming, banking, healthcare, enterprise software, and cloud services depend on data centres establishes their function. It does not answer how much electricity a proposed site needs, how its cooling works, whether it consumes water, what backup generation is planned, or how many people it will employ permanently.
Those questions can only be answered at project level.
Operators capable of disclosing connection requirements, efficiency targets, water strategy, heat-reuse plans, construction effects, and permanent employment have a firmer basis for public scrutiny than developers relying primarily on descriptions of the importance of the digital economy.
Greater awareness therefore changes the communications problem rather than resolving it.
As data centres become more familiar infrastructure, communities are increasingly in a position to compare their benefits with their physical requirements.
Telehouse’s latest figures indicate that the industry cannot assume familiarity will produce consent. Public understanding appears to be improving at the same time as the questions being asked of individual developments are becoming more demanding.
