Clock / UK data centres / The North · updated 26 October 2026
In 2024, data centres in Greater Manchester, the ten Greater Manchester boroughs, used 95 GWh (0.10 TWh) of electricity from the grid. That was 1.0% of all grid electricity consumed in the area src.
Gigawatt-hours of grid electricity used by data centres each year, and that use as a share of all grid electricity in Greater Manchester. Source: DESNZ src.
| Year | Data centres | GWh | Share of area electricity |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 21 | 93 | 0.9% |
| 2021 | 21 | 95 | 0.9% |
| 2022 | 22 | 95 | 1.0% |
| 2023 | 22 | 96 | 1.0% |
| 2024 | 22 | 95 | 1.0% |
Use went from 93 GWh in 2020 to 95 GWh in 2024, up 2%, while the share of local electricity moved from 0.9% to 1.0%. DESNZ counted 21 operational data centres here in 2020 and 22 in 2024 src. Across Great Britain, data centre use rose 41% over the same period.
Greater Manchester used 2.1% of all data centre electricity in Great Britain in 2024 (95 of 4,460 GWh). Among the 5 local areas DESNZ names individually, it ranks 5th for total data centre electricity and 5th for the share of local electricity going to data centres src. For comparison, data centres used 1.8% of grid electricity across Great Britain as a whole.
95 GWh is about the yearly electricity of 38,100 typical UK homes, at Ofgem's 2,500 kWh a year for a medium home src. DESNZ's two figures also imply that all grid users in Greater Manchester used about 9,913 GWh in 2024 (data centre use ÷ its share).
Derived: homes = data centre kWh ÷ 2,500 kWh, rounded to 3 significant figures. Implied area total = data centre GWh ÷ share. Share of GB = area GWh ÷ GB data centre GWh.
Greater Manchester accounts for 57% of data centre electricity in the North (166 GWh) src.
OpenStreetMap and Wikidata have 11 data centre sites mapped inside Greater Manchester's boundary src src, 8 of them with a name: Asanti Manchester, CDL Strata Campus Data Centre, Datum Datacentres (MCR2), Equinix MA1, Equinix MA4, Evolution @ Agecroft Commerce Park, Joule House, Lunar 1&2.
Sites placed by point-in-polygon against ONS local authority boundaries src. Community-mapped sites aren't the same list as DESNZ's count (which only includes colocation and hyperscale data centres with matched meters), so the two numbers differ. OpenStreetMap snapshot: 21 September 2026. Missing one? Add it to OpenStreetMap. See them on the map.
DESNZ's figures cover colocation, managed hosting and hyperscale data centres whose electricity meters could be matched; they exclude enterprise (in-house) data centres and on-site generation, so they're a floor, not a total. Some areas are grouped by DESNZ for disclosure reasons. Download this page's data: local.json.