Proposed London datacentre will have annual carbon footprint of 27,000 flights to New York
Planning documents for a proposed hyperscale data centre in North Ockendon, outer London, show it would produce over one million tonnes of CO2 annually — equivalent to 27,000 transatlantic flights. The facility, which would occupy 218 hectares of green belt land, has been flagged as incompatible with UK net zero targets.
Why this matters: The demand driving this is largely AI and cloud computing. That means every company racing to deploy models, and every government adopting AI tools, is connected to trade-offs like this one. Green belt land gets consumed. Carbon targets get harder to hit. The people who bear those costs — local residents, future climate — are not the ones benefiting from faster inference speeds. If AI infrastructure keeps scaling at this pace, the environmental accounting needs to be part of the conversation, not buried in planning documents.
Who should care: General readers · AI governance · Policy
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