Sleepless in Slough: the residents who fear for their failing health in Europe’s data centre capital

At two or three in the morning, Susan can sometimes feel her bed begin to move. 

“The floor was vibrating,” she says. “And then my whole bed was vibrating so I was up for hours.”

It is not, she says, the sort of vibration that produces a visible ripple in a glass of water; it is a sensation faint enough to be difficult to demonstrate but enough to feel when you are lying awake in the small hours.

The whirring of a data centre can be heard 10 metres from the entrance to her home because she lives in the country’s data centre capital: Slough.

Since last year Susan – not her real name – has been living in social housing in the Berkshire town that, for a certain generation of Brits, remains indelibly associated with David Brent and the grey office parks of The Office. The joke, of course, was always partly about the place.

Slough has long been the magnificently unglamorous landscape of modern corporate Britain, but since 2021 it has a new claim to fame. It’s home to the second largest data-centre cluster in the world. 

The rapid expansion of data centres is hugely controversial, because facilities require enormous amounts of electricity to run servers and cooling systems, threatening to strain power grids and increase reliance on fossil fuels. More than 10 public protests against data centres have taken place across the country this year, with an estimated 500 data centres now in the UK, and a further 173 in the planning stage. 

With an estimated 40 facilities packed tightly together, primarily on the Slough Trading Estate, it’s Europe’s answer to the vast cluster of around 250 in Northern Virginia. In the US’s “Data Center Alley”, residents experience constant industrial-scale noise pollution from round-the-clock cooling fans and air chillers.

The comparison with the Berkshire town is not hard to make. Between Slough’s residential streets stand thick pockets of the windowless buildings, run by companies such as NTT, Equinix, Digital Realty, Kao Data, Virtus and Global Technical Realty (GTR). These are highly secure compounds that keep servers running which Big Tech depends on 24/7. Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle are among the major companies known to rely on the infrastructure in the town. 

“It’s hard to tell what these buildings even are and you never see any office workers,” Susan tells me. What you can see from the pavement are high metal fences, security guards, CCTV cameras and private property signs, but rarely any indication of who is inside and what they are processing.

Five minutes’ walk away from Susan’s home is a cluster of hyperscale data centres known as GB One, run by GTR, which has a total of 40.5MW of capacity (or enough to power 142,000 homes for a year). They have been leased in their entirety to a single customer, but GTR has not publicly named who it is. 

The ownership of these buildings can be complex and hard to trace. But GTR is backed by KKR, a New York investment giant that helped make the “leveraged buyout” one of the defining financial instruments of the late 20th century. Its billionaire co-founder and co-executive chairman, Henry Kravis, is a major Republican donor; his gifts include $1m to Donald Trump’s 2017 presidential inaugural committee. But it’s not clear in Slough that the data centre is backed by one of the most powerful firms in American finance, and the identity of the company occupying those three buildings is not advertised.

Susan’s social housing block is located within a one-mile radius of at least 10 data centres. One, operated by NTT, is roughly 50 metres from her home, with several more facilities nearby.

Susan has chronic health conditions, which makes the unpredictability of these soft vibrations particularly problematic. Some nights, Susan says, the disturbance begins at 1.30am, disappears at 3am, and then returns before five, by which point the possibility of anything resembling an ordinary night’s sleep has vanished. “How are you supposed to sleep when your whole flat is vibrating and your bed is vibrating?”

“I’m having symptoms that don’t line up with my chronic illness,” she says. And because she has been living with multiple diagnoses for years, disentangling cause from coincidence is especially difficult. She does know, however, that something has changed. Her asthma, normally dormant, has become active; she describes periods of breathlessness, dizziness and nausea, along with headaches and ear pain. On one occasion, she went to hospital with chest pain. Whether any of this was caused or exacerbated by the infrastructure surrounding her home, she cannot know – and neither, at present, can her doctors.

What she can describe with certainty is what the past year has felt like. “My whole life has been destroyed over just a year,” she says. “My quality of life.”

And there is an oddity about where she lives. Though her building was converted to residential homes in 2021, it was originally intended for early 2000s commercial office use, with disused foyers a reminder of its corporate heyday. 

Susan is not the only resident here who describes a disturbance. Another family in the building, including two children, told me they too had experienced vibrations and disrupted sleep.

It would be wrong to draw a firm conclusion about cause and effect for Susan’s experience: “data centres arrive, resident becomes ill”. The evidence does not support a conclusion as simple as that. But as with all residents living close to such facilities, a good place to start is with the noise.

“There’s a lot of low-frequency noise where you get a body reaction rather than a hearing reaction,” says noise pollution expert John Stewart. “It can disturb your entire nervous system.”

For 20 years, he chaired the campaign that successfully defeated plans for Heathrow’s third runway; and, he says, Slough is an interesting place to build aircooled data centres given that it’s under Heathrow’s flight path. “It may not be deliberate, but if I was cynical I’d think it was intentional,” he says. “It already gets a lot of noise; will they worry if there’s more noise?” 

There is remarkably little research into the effect of data centres’ low-frequency acoustic emissions on the people living around them. A 2026 review by researchers at the University of North Texas found that, despite the rapid expansion of the industry, no published study had yet measured the full infrasound and low-frequency spectrum of an operational data centre and simultaneously examined health outcomes among workers or neighbouring communities. 

The World Health Organization’s night-noise guidance recommends an annual average of less than 40 decibels outside bedrooms to protect public health. While in Slough to interview Susan, I measured the decibels outside her home using a sound meter app on my phone for a few minutes in the middle of the day. It averaged around 62.8 decibels, with peaks of 66.8. 

Not all noise behaves in quite the way we imagine it does; low-frequency sound travels efficiently and can be harder for buildings to keep out.

Susan has struggled to find healthcare professionals who know what questions to ask about living beside this new industrial neighbour. “I think GPs should be more aware of this, especially in this area when we’ve got 40 data centres,” she says. “I can’t be the only one being affected.”

The town’s industrial inheritance has proved to be useful in real-estate terms. The trading estate near Susan was once home to factories that turned out Citroën cars and Dulux paint. The old industries moved on, but the land remained industrial on paper, giving data centres a useful planning headstart. The council says their legacy simplified planning system still allows industrial development to proceed in the area with greater “speed and certainty”.

The BBC also reports that Slough’s unusually fast fibre-optic connections are one reason so many data centres have clustered in the town.

But the cluster is making its way outside the old industrial footprint. At Manor Farm in Poyle, developers proposed a vast data centre on green belt land. When the council failed to reach a decision in time, the developer appealed. The case was then “recovered” by the secretary of state for housing, taking the final decision out of local hands and into Westminster. In June 2026, the government granted permission.

“I think there’s a reason it would be harder to build a data centre if it was in the range of Windsor Castle than if it was here,” says Stewart. 

Today, Slough is the third most densely populated local authority in the south-east, with 160,000 residents within 13 square miles and 52 schools educating more than 31,000 children. Yet some data centres can be approved without going through the conventional planning process of other local authorities. 

Chandra Muvvala, a local independent councillor, introduced a motion to Slough borough council on 24 September asking the government to carry out a cumulative impact assessment on communities living in and around data centres. 

“Not having a data centre is certainly better than having a data centre,” he says, arguing that there is no benefit at this stage to building more of them. “You’re talking about going into marginalised populations that already have a lower life expectancy,” he says, pointing out that on average, men in Slough start living in poor health at 58 years old, compared to 61 as the national average. 

I asked Slough council what they planned to do about residents’ complaints about living close to data centres. A council spokesperson said: “If there is an issue in any temporary accommodation property the resident would report it to us, we visit and inspect, and if the complaint is upheld and the agents/landlords can’t improve the environment with something like air conditioning, triple glazing or dampeners, we would offer the customer a transfer.”

For local people campaigning against data-centre expansion, there is no respite. Next up are proposals for a facility owned and run by Microsoft at Langley Business Centre, on a site where an earlier scheme had proposed both a data centre and 60 affordable homes. 

That permission has since lapsed, and Microsoft says its new proposal is instead “focused on data center use”, with a building reaching around 26 metres high, no homes and a power substation requiring a separate planning application. 

As one proposal follows another, locals are worried why so much of the infrastructure is being concentrated near them. “Why do we allow the zoning of warehouses to decide the location of these?” says one resident close to the Langley site, John Willis. “What is it that says all of this needs to destroy one town? There’s no joined-up thinking here.” 

“And what’s it for? Is it so someone can make an AI company?”

Susan has not been named to protect her identity. 

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