The Small English Town Swept Up in the Global AI Arms Race
A short drive from London, the town of Potters Bar is separated from the village of South Mimms by 85 acres of rolling farmland segmented by a scribble of hedges. In one of the fields, a solitary oak serves as a resting place along a public footpath. Lately, the tree has also become a place of protest. A poster tied to the trunk reads: “NO TO DATA CENTER.”
In September 2024, a property developer permission requested to build an industrial-scale data center – one of the largest in Europe – on the farmland. When locals caught wind, they started a Facebook group in hopes of blocking the project. More than 1000 people have signed up.
The local government has so far dismissed the group's complaints. In January 2025 it is granted planning permission. The following October, multinational data center operator Equinix acquired the land; it aims to break ground this year.
On a gloomy Thursday afternoon in January, I huddled around a gate leading to the farmland with Ros Naylor – one of the Facebook group administrators – and six other local residents. They told me they object to the data center on several grounds, but especially the loss of green space, which they see as an invaluable escape route from city to countryside and buffer against the highway and fuel stop visible on the horizon. “The beauty of walking in this area comes through this space,” Naylor says. “It's incredibly important for mental health and well-being.”
If the UK government races to meet the voracious demand however, large facilities will be built for data centers that can be used to train AI models and run AI applications over the land. For the people who live nearby, however, the prospect that AI could boost the economy or infuse new capabilities into their smartphone is thin consolation for what they see as a disruption of a rural way of life.
Bonfire of Red Tape
Since the mid-20th century, London has been surrounded on all sides by an almost contiguous patchwork of land known as the green belt, made up of farms, woodland, meadows and parks. Under UK law, construction is only permitted on green belt land in “very special circumstances.” The goal is to protect rural areas from urban encroachment and stop neighboring cities from melting into an amorphous blob.
After the current government came to power in 2024, however, the United Kingdom introduced a new soil classification-gray belt-to describe underperforming packages of green belt where construction should be more easily allowed. Around the same time, the government announced that it would treat data centers as “critical national infrastructure.” Together they have changes cleared the way in front of many new data centers to build across the UK.
When they try to develop models capable of surpassing human intelligenceare the world's largest AI labs plans to spend trillions of dollars in aggregate on infrastructure. All over the world, where new data centers are being built, are developers encounter organized resistance of affected communities.
When the local planning authority approved the Potters Bar data centre, its officials concluded that the farmland met the definition of gray belt. They also said their decision was colored by the government's support for the data center industry. The benefits from an infrastructure development and economic standpoint, they concluded, outweighed the loss of green space.
“People have this slightly romantic idea that all green belt land consists of real estate, rolling green fields. The reality is that this site, along with many others, is anything but that,” says Jeremy Newmark, leader of Hertsmere Borough Council, the constituency that includes Potters Bar. “It's a place of very low-performing green belt land.”
