According to DCD, Amazon Data Services has filed with Buckinghamshire Council to develop a 30,525 square meter data center campus at the Ridgeway Distribution Centre in Iver, located just outside London. The project involves demolishing existing structures and constructing a two-story data center building with 27 backup generators, using evaporative cooling technology for energy efficiency. This development forms part of Amazon’s previously announced £8 billion ($10.47 billion) UK investment spanning 2024-2028, following Amazon’s 2022 purchase of the site from investment firm Abrdn for £132.5 million. The location positions AWS strategically in the established Slough data center corridor, which already hosts major players like CyrusOne and Greystoke. This expansion signals AWS’s deepening commitment to UK cloud infrastructure.
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The Slough Corridor’s Growing Dominance
The choice of Iver represents more than just available real estate—it’s a strategic positioning within one of Europe’s most concentrated data center markets. The Slough corridor has evolved into what industry insiders call the “data center alley” of the United Kingdom, benefiting from excellent fiber connectivity, reliable power infrastructure, and proximity to the economic engine of London. By clustering near existing facilities, AWS gains access to established technical talent pools and can leverage existing utility infrastructure, though this concentration also creates potential vulnerability to regional power or connectivity issues affecting multiple providers simultaneously.
Sustainable Cooling Strategy Faces UK Climate Challenges
The planned evaporative and adiabatic cooling systems represent AWS’s commitment to water efficiency, but they introduce operational complexities in the UK’s variable climate. Direct evaporative cooling works well for most of the year in the UK’s temperate conditions, but during increasingly common heatwaves, the switch to adiabatic cooling with rainwater collection could face strain. With UK summers growing warmer and drought conditions becoming more frequent, the reliance on rainwater as primary supply during hot periods could prove problematic. This underscores the broader challenge facing Amazon and other hyperscalers: balancing energy efficiency with climate resilience in facility design.
£8 Billion Bet on UK Digital Economy
This single project represents just one piece of Amazon’s massive £8 billion UK infrastructure commitment, which signals confidence in Britain’s post-Brexit digital economy despite economic headwinds. The scale of investment suggests AWS anticipates substantial growth in UK cloud adoption across financial services, healthcare, and public sector digital transformation. However, this expansion comes amid increasing regulatory scrutiny of cloud market concentration and concerns about energy consumption. The timing is particularly interesting given the UK government’s push for sovereign cloud capabilities and potential legislation that could require greater data localization for certain sectors.
Intensifying European Cloud Wars
AWS’s UK expansion occurs against a backdrop of fierce competition with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud across Europe. While AWS established its first UK region in 2016 near Bristol, Microsoft now offers multiple UK regions, and Google has been aggressively expanding its European footprint. The concentration of development in the Ridgeway area and other identified locations like Didcot and Swindon suggests AWS is creating a distributed architecture within the UK to provide redundancy and lower latency. This infrastructure arms race reflects the growing importance of edge computing and hybrid cloud strategies, where geographic proximity to customers becomes increasingly valuable for latency-sensitive applications.
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Community and Infrastructure Strain Concerns
While the economic benefits of such developments are clear, the conversion of industrial estates to data centers raises questions about local community impact and infrastructure capacity. The Ridgeway Trading Estate currently hosts diverse businesses from vehicle repairs to logistics, and its transformation represents the ongoing conversion of traditional industrial land to digital infrastructure. Such projects typically bring high-value jobs but minimal employment density compared to the businesses they replace. Additionally, the substantial power requirements—evidenced by the planned substation compound and 27 generators—will test local grid capacity at a time when the UK faces broader energy security challenges.
