Bikers and Bug-Lovers Join Forces to Fight a New Google Data Center

On Wednesday afternoon, Jamie Robins strolled up to the entrance of Google’s UK headquarters in Kings Cross, London. He brandished a letter containing details of a petition signed by almost 55,000 people, calling for Google to abandon plans to build a large new data center in Thurrock, 15 miles to the east of London.

Robins works for wildlife conservation trust Buglife, part of an unlikely alliance of special-interest groups trying to block the Thurrock development. Buglife and local wildlife groups fear for an endangered plant, rare bumblebee, and other invertebrates whose habitat they say will be destroyed. Nonprofit Foxglove says the data center will emit too much pollution. The Thurrock Hammers motorcycle club wants to return to racing on the site.

Members of the various groups joined Robins outside Google’s office last Wednesday, holding placards demanding the company “search elsewhere” for somewhere to put its facility.

Across the UK, companies like Google are preparing to build industrial-scale data centers, part of a scramble to meet the swelling demand for the compute needed to run artificial intelligence models and other digital services. The UK government is eager to encourage them, hoping to capture a share of the hundreds of billions of dollars flowing into the AI industry and minimize the country’s dependence on foreign partners for compute. But like in the US, people living near to the proposed developments are making their objections known and trying to gum up the works.

Google says its plans for the Thurrock site prioritize biodiversity and the reduction of emissions. “We share the concerns that Buglife and others have—and their expectation that this site should be developed sustainably,” Adam Elman, director of sustainability EMEA at Google, tells WIRED. But the situation in Thurrock underscores the level and breadth of resistance that data center developers face as the public mood towards them appears to sour. Though small, the demonstration outside Google was one of a number of anti-data center protests that took place across Europe last week. In Amsterdam, protesters scaled a crane at a Microsoft data center site and unfurled a “fuck AI” banner.

“There’s local campaign groups against data centers popping up every week,” says Robins. “People are angry about data centers turning up in their back gardens. They’re angry about data centers flouting local opinion—and about the impact it has on wildlife.”

The Thurrock site is located next to a fuel stop, where an arterial road meets the highway that encircles London. On the plot, the remnants of Arena Essex, a disused motorcycle racing stadium, border grassland scribbled with old footpaths, and a lake.

Google acquired the site through a subsidiary in 2023. In May last year, it applied for permission to build a data center campus there. When locals caught wind, they coordinated with national wildlife and environmental groups and began to kick up a fuss. Of the 1,000 responses submitted by members of the public to the planning authority, only one supported the project. (Thurrock Council says that many of the responses were submitted by people living outside the local area.)

The protest group argues that Google’s proposal fails to properly account for the negative effects of the data center development: the loss of the raceway sporting facility, the destruction of habitat for rare flora and fauna, and the up to 570,000 tonnes of emissions it could produce each year—which Foxglove claims cannot be accommodated under the UK government’s carbon budget.

“We’re an outlier. We object on different grounds. I think that’s why I think we’re quite useful to the whole campaign,” says Mark Sexton, director at the Thurrock Hammers motorcycle club. “The unlikely alliance has got some attention.”

Google says the objections are grounded in misconceptions about its plans. The company claims it will achieve a net gain in biodiversity by retaining habitat and transplanting endangered plants to another location; and that it will offset the emissions by financing new sources of renewable energy generation, with a view to becoming carbon-neutral by 2030. Google argues that razing the motorcycle stadium will not result in the loss of an invaluable community facility because the track has already been out of use for a number of years. “We want to be good neighbors,” says Elman. “We recognize the ecological value of these sites. Our goal is to minimize the impact as much as possible.”

Unconvinced by Google’s reassurances, the protesters intend to continue to fight the development—one small act of protest at a time. “Do I think we’ve got much hope? Not right now,” says Rob Pownall, founder of nonprofit Protect The Wild, who attended Wednesday’s demonstration. “But this is another chip off that massive ice block.”

There are some signs the grassroots anti-data center movement is starting to win concessions. In the US, some states have instituted permitting freezes and data center moratoria, and pro-data center candidates were roundly crushed in this week’s midterm elections. In the UK, Foxglove recently succeeded in a legal challenge that forced the government to withdraw planning permission for a data center to the west of London.

Thurrock Council tells WIRED it expects to rule on Google’s initial planning application early next year. After that, the company will need to come up with a more granular plan for developing the site, which will be subject to another lengthy vetting process. The protesters say they intend to make life hard for Google at every step.

“These planning campaigns can go on for years,” says Robins. “It’s a war of attrition.”