Planned London datacentre would emit more carbon per year than 27,000 transatlantic flights
Planning documents for a vast AI data facility on London's green belt show annual emissions topping one million tonnes of CO2, raising serious questions about whether AI infrastructure can ever be squared with net-zero commitments.
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.
Planning documents filed with Havering Council, first reported by The Guardian, show a proposed datacentre on London's edge could produce more than one million tonnes of CO2 annually. The figures come from the developer's own submissions, not from outside critics.
The East Havering Data Centre Campus would sit in north Ockendon, a mostly rural area in outer east London, covering 218 hectares of green belt land that planning rules normally protect from development.
What exactly would this place do?
Servers and data storage systems for AI workloads and cloud computing would fill the site. Cloud computing is the model where businesses rent processing power over the internet rather than running their own machines. Developer Digital Reef describes the campus as hyperscale, meaning large enough to serve entire regions or continents at once.
Digital Reef calls the project "a unique opportunity to create a sustainable datacentre campus of the future." Its own planning documents, though, put projected annual CO2 emissions at more than one million tonnes. That number doesn't sit comfortably next to a sustainability claim.
On 8 August, we reported that Amazon's gas plant in West Texas carries a pollution permit larger than any coal facility in the US, with the company insisting its climate commitment stands even as its own emissions have risen for years. The pattern here is familiar.
Does that figure make it incompatible with the UK's climate targets?
In plain terms, yes. The UK is legally committed to net zero by 2050, meaning total greenhouse gas emissions must fall as close to nothing as possible. Adding a facility emitting over a million tonnes annually runs directly against that trajectory, particularly when the country is still working to close existing sources rather than open new ones.
A datacentre doesn't burn fuel directly, but it draws power at a scale that forces the grid to do so on its behalf. AI systems need enormous electricity to train and run, and that electricity still comes largely from fossil fuels even in grids adding renewables quickly.
What happens next?
Havering Council will decide whether to approve the application. No date has been set. Green belt development of this scale would typically require the council to demonstrate "very special circumstances" justify overriding normal protections, a high legal bar.
For residents near north Ockendon, the immediate concerns are planning disruption and noise. The broader point is harder to ignore: computing demand is growing fast, and that growth carries a carbon cost that doesn't disappear because the end product feels intangible. The AI sector can't keep treating emissions as a footnote to its own ambitions.
