Planned London datacentre would emit more carbon per year than 27,000 transatlantic flights

Key points

• The proposed East Havering Data Centre Campus in north Ockendon, outer London, would generate more than one million tonnes of CO2 every year, according to its own planning documents.
• That annual carbon output equals the footprint of roughly 27,000 return flights between London and New York.
• Developer Digital Reef wants to build on 218 hectares of green belt land, which would make this one of the largest datacentres in Europe.
• Havering Council must still approve the scheme; no decision has been made.

A single datacentre proposed for the edge of London could produce more carbon in a year than most small countries, planning documents show. The figures, first reported by The Guardian, come from the developer's own submissions to Havering Council, not from outside critics.

The facility is called the East Havering Data Centre Campus, or EHDCC. It would sit in north Ockendon, a mostly rural area in outer east London, and cover 218 hectares of green belt, land that planning rules normally protect from development to keep open space around cities.

What exactly would this place do?

It would house servers and data storage systems for AI workloads and cloud computing, the kind of computing where businesses rent processing power over the internet rather than running their own machines. The site's developer, Digital Reef, describes it as a hyperscale datacentre campus, meaning a facility so large it can serve entire regions or continents at once.

Digital Reef calls the project "a unique opportunity to create a sustainable datacentre campus of the future." The planning documents, however, put projected annual CO2 emissions at more than one million tonnes. For scale, the average UK household produces roughly 2.4 tonnes of CO2 a year. This single campus would match the combined output of more than 400,000 homes.

Does that figure make it incompatible with the UK's climate targets?

Yes, in plain terms. The UK government is legally committed to reaching net zero, meaning the country must cut its total greenhouse gas emissions to as close to nothing as possible by 2050. Adding a facility that emits over a million tonnes annually runs directly against that direction of travel, particularly when the country is still working to close existing emission sources, not open new ones.

The tension here is not unique to this project. AI systems require enormous amounts of electricity to train and run, and that electricity still comes largely from fossil fuels, even in grids that are rapidly adding renewables. A datacentre does not burn fuel directly, but it draws power at a scale that forces the grid to do so on its behalf.

What happens next?

Havering Council will decide whether to approve the application. No date has been set. Green belt development of this size would typically require the council to show "very special circumstances" justify overriding normal protections, a high legal bar.

For people living near north Ockendon, the immediate concerns are planning, traffic and noise. For everyone else, the case illustrates a tension the whole AI sector must face: the demand for computing power is growing fast, and that growth has a carbon cost that does not disappear just because the end product feels intangible.