Just two new data centres will pump out more planet-heating carbon emissions than ExxonMobil – Foxglove analysis
2026 is already the hottest year ever the UK has ever seen, and heatwaves this summer have reportedly led to the deaths of around 30,000 people in Europe alone so far.
For anyone living through this brutal demonstration of climate disaster in action the idea of building new gas power plants to burn more fossil fuel, blasting gigantic amounts of new carbon into our air to power AI data centres, may seem absurd and unhinged, like throwing petrol on a blazing wildfire or the actions of a cackling cartoon supervillain.
But that is exactly what Big Tech bosses around the world are proposing to do. In the US, Elon Musk plans to build 41 new gas turbines at xAI’s “Colossus 2” data centre in northern Mississippi. So much for those solar-powered data centres in space eh Elon?
Last year, Nvidia chief Jensen Huang said he hoped that the UK would build new gas turbines to power data centres – presumably so he can keep selling chips to the Big Tech companies that own and profit from them.
It’s easy to see what Mr Huang gets out of that deal; less obvious what we do, as our railways buckle in the sun, our rivers and reservoirs run dry and A&E waiting rooms overflow with people suffering from the heat.
Nevertheless, he seems to be getting his wish. On Tuesday, the Guardian published a story based on Foxglove’s analysis that just two new data centres will spew out more planet-heating carbon emissions than the entire UK operations of ExxonMobil, the biggest American oil and petrochemicals company in the world.
Developers for both new data centres, at Wapseys Wood in Buckinghamshire and at Quest Park in Bedfordshire, will build their own new private gas power stations for the specific purpose of powering the data centres.
Taken together, the proposed new data centres will consume 1.3GW of power and blast out more than 4.5m tonnes of carbon emissions. The total UK carbon emissions of ExxonMobil in 2023 was around 3.9m tonnes.
These are staggering, ludicrous numbers – and from just two new data UK data centre sites.
There is simply no world in which such massive new carbon emissions are compatible with a serious plan for reaching net zero by 2050. You can either have a serious plan for cooling down our country and reducing our use of dirty and dangerous oil and gas power, or you can have gigantic new gas power plants for new data centres – you can’t have both.
The gas and oil industry knows this. Big Tech going full “drill baby drill” is the best news the petrochemical industry has had in 30 years (and some of the worst for the rest of us).
This needs to be called out for what it is: an existential threat to the UK’s chances of combatting climate disaster.
Not only that, but both Wapseys Wood and Quest Park are two of the first data centres being considered as Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIPs). That means the final decision on whether or not they are built would be made by a government minister – not the community where they will be built and will have to suffer the consequences. So ministers have no excuses and nowhere to hide.
That’s why Foxglove is committed to doing the work needed to get the word out about the scale of the threat posed by allowing new gas power to be brought online to power new hyperscale data centres – both in the UK and elsewhere. More to come on that soon.
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