Plans for a new data center with ties to Amazon are rankling residents in a small United Kingdom town, leaving them with unanswered questions about the impact on the area.

What's happening?

Colliers Properties has submitted revised plans to the Central Bedfordshire Council for two 65-foot data centers, along with backup generators and solar panels, per a report from Luton Today. The company is a known partner of Amazon, and the plans say the site will host cloud computing infrastructure.

Foxglove, a nonprofit organization that fights for a "fairer tech future," told the outlet that the plans should be rejected on the basis of a lack of information being provided to the local council.

"Local councils across the country face critical knowledge gaps over the huge drinking water and power needs — as well as the tons of polluting emissions — of gigantic new data centers. We already know new data centers proposed in the U.K. will spew the carbon emissions of multiple international airports into our air," Donald Campbell, Foxglove director of advocacy, told Luton Today.

"That knowledge gap is particularly stark in the case of the new data center planned at Houghton Regis. It hasn't even been revealed how much power the site will use, despite the massive impact this could have on the local area."

Why are data centers important?

Data centers require massive quantities of water to maintain cooling. According to CNET, a Google data center used 355 million gallons of water, roughly equal to 538 Olympic-size swimming pools, to cool its operations in 2021. 

There's also the issue of where the energy is coming from to power the center. While the proposal mentions solar panels, data centers drive up electricity demands, a cost that has begun to impact residents in towns, and often still requires dirty energy to produce. 

What's being done about data centers?

Amazon does try to take steps in the right direction to mitigate its environmental and community impact, like using recycled water in its Georgia data center, adding electric vehicles to its delivery fleet, and switching to recyclable paper filler in its packaging. 

However, the overall impact on communities is still enormous, from its data centers in one state requiring vast amounts of power to the waste and pollution generated by shipping products. 

Communities are pushing back on data centers more, showing the importance of speaking up and speaking out to protect everyone's well-being. 

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