Clock / UK data centres / Inner London · updated 26 October 2026
In 2024, data centres in Tower Hamlets, the east London borough that includes Docklands, used 430 GWh (0.43 TWh) of electricity from the grid. That was 18.2% 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 Tower Hamlets. Source: DESNZ src.
| Year | Data centres | GWh | Share of area electricity |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 29 | 452 | 18.3% |
| 2021 | 29 | 424 | 17.2% |
| 2022 | 29 | 443 | 18.3% |
| 2023 | 29 | 430 | 18.4% |
| 2024 | 29 | 430 | 18.2% |
Use went from 452 GWh in 2020 to 430 GWh in 2024, down 5%, while the share of local electricity moved from 18.3% to 18.2%. DESNZ counted 29 operational data centres here in 2020 and 29 in 2024 src. Across Great Britain, data centre use rose 41% over the same period.
Tower Hamlets used 9.6% of all data centre electricity in Great Britain in 2024 (430 of 4,460 GWh). Among the 5 local areas DESNZ names individually, it ranks 3rd for total data centre electricity and 3rd 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.
430 GWh is about the yearly electricity of 172,000 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 Tower Hamlets used about 2,356 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.
Tower Hamlets accounts for 88% of data centre electricity in Inner London (489 GWh) src.
OpenStreetMap and Wikidata have 14 data centre sites mapped inside Tower Hamlets's boundary src src, 14 of them with a name: Cable & Wireless Data Centre, Digital Realty LHR20, Digital Realty London LON3, Equinix LD8, Global Switch London East, Global Switch London North, IP House London Datacentre, London Stock Exchange datacenter, Sky, Stellanor London East, Telehouse North, Telehouse North Two, Telehouse South, Telstra London Hosting Centre.
Sites with a recorded opening year: Telehouse North (1990), Telehouse North Two (2016).
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 Tower Hamlets. The nearest is Culham, Oxfordshire, roughly 85 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.
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.