Clock / UK data centres / South East · updated 26 October 2026
In 2024, data centres in Slough, the Berkshire town just west of London, home to the Slough Trading Estate, used 1,293 GWh (1.29 TWh) of electricity from the grid. That was 65.2% 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 Slough. Source: DESNZ src.
| Year | Data centres | GWh | Share of area electricity |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 21 | 620 | 44.4% |
| 2021 | 23 | 750 | 49.3% |
| 2022 | 26 | 934 | 56.6% |
| 2023 | 29 | 1,087 | 59.9% |
| 2024 | 30 | 1,293 | 65.2% |
Use went from 620 GWh in 2020 to 1,293 GWh in 2024, up 109%, while the share of local electricity moved from 44.4% to 65.2%. DESNZ counted 21 operational data centres here in 2020 and 30 in 2024 src. Across Great Britain, data centre use rose 41% over the same period.
Slough used 29.0% of all data centre electricity in Great Britain in 2024 (1,293 of 4,460 GWh). Among the 5 local areas DESNZ names individually, it ranks 1st for total data centre electricity and 1st 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.
1,293 GWh is about the yearly electricity of 517,000 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 Slough used about 1,985 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.
Slough accounts for 72% of data centre electricity in the South East (1,785 GWh) src.
OpenStreetMap and Wikidata have 22 data centre sites mapped inside Slough's boundary src src, 21 of them with a name: China Mobile Slough, CryrusOne LON4, CryrusOne LON5, CyrusOne LON3, Digital Realty LHR26, Elasticity Slough, Equinix LD10, Equinix LD11x, Equinix LD5, Equinix LD6, Equinix LD7, Global Technical Realty London GB One, Iron Mountain LON-3, Iron Mountain London LON-1, Lumen, NTT Slough 2, NTT Slough 3, VIRTUS London 11, Virgin Media O2 Slough, Virtus London 12, Yondr.
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.
There's no AI Growth Zone in Slough. The nearest is Culham, Oxfordshire, roughly 50 km away in a straight line src. All UK AI Growth Zones →
Distance measured from the middle of the area's bounding box to the Growth Zone's town-level map pin, rounded to the nearest 5 km.
Why Slough? Read the Slough story →
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.