The feverish scramble by capitalists to build more and more data centres, enormous warehouses of servers, semiconductors, processors, heatsinks and hard drives, is set to become a major contributor to environmental and ecological degradation. Their proliferation is essential to support the level of data processing required for the evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) and the possibilities it presents for revolutionising the productivity of labour and thereby displacing living labour. Data centres are the physical infrastructure which companies use to process, package and sell our personal data: who we are and what we do, from when we brush our teeth to what we buy and where we work. This data has become a means for potential capitalist profit.
Data centre hardware requires huge quantities of critical rare earth minerals and precious metals, with considerable manufacturing costs in energy and carbon emissions from mining, refinement and assembly. Moreover, the hardware in data centres needs replacement every 3-5 years, not due to failure, but from the profit-driven requirement to accelerate processing speeds and expand data storage.
In operation, data centres contribute to environmental degradation of their local area, with continuous server operations raising land surface temperatures by as much as 9.1°C, and with the ‘data heat island effect’ felt up to six miles away. Air and noise pollution compound the damage to wildlife and people living nearby. Cooling the hardware requires enormous amounts of water, with standard medium-size centres using upwards of one million litres of water every day, and the largest centres requiring up to five million, equivalent to the average daily water use of 35,000 people. This is alongside substantially increased energy demands for the energy grid, with data centres using electricity equivalent to 2,000 homes, and centres being prioritised over people when capacity is strained.
The increasing demand for rare earth minerals and precious metals is fuelling imperialist theft and subsequent destabilisation in countries which hold these raw materials. The Rubaya mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) account for 15% of the world’s supply of tantalum, a rare earth mineral necessary for data centre components. The mines have collapsed twice as a result of over-mining to meet ever-increasing demand, first in January 2026, killing over 400 workers, and then again in March 2026, killing a further 200. M23, an organisation systematically mass murdering and terrorising people across eastern DRC, seized the Rubaya mines in May 2024 and uses revenue generated in selling tantalum to the data processing industry to fund its military operations.
Downstream from the environmental and human cost of mining minerals is the carbon cost of manufacturing the components. NVIDIA, the world’s largest manufacturer of data centre processors, reported carbon emissions of 10.7 million metric tonnes in the 2026 fiscal year, roughly equivalent to the carbon dioxide produced by an entire country, Lebanon, in the same period. This is triple NVIDIA’s reported carbon emissions from two years earlier in 2024. NVIDIA’s revenue has jumped from $60.9bn to 215.9bn over the same period,and its 2026 fiscal report shows that nearly all revenue for the year has come from data centres (193.7bn).
Britain has over 560 data centres, more than any other country in Europe. China has 370 and India 305, both countries with populations twenty times greater than that of Britain. In 2025, a UK government report estimated that data centres accounted for 2.5% of Britain’s electricity use. Just one year on, data centres now account for 5.9% of the country’s usage.
As one of its first acts in government, Labour designated data centres as Critical National Infrastructure, placing them alongside energy, water and emergency services, giving limited room for local opposition by bypassing local authorities altogether. The Cyber Security and Resilience Bill, which passed through the House of Commons in June 2026, will go a step further, classifying data centres as an ‘essential service’. Labour’s policy paper for the bill makes no attempt at hiding the reason behind the classification, openly admitting that data centres will be given protection equivalent to that for ambulance and fire services on the grounds of ‘enabling secure growth’.
Data centres are big business, and the British state is making clear once again that it is not a neutral organ equally serving the interests of all its population, but rather a body in service of the ruling class. A £500m redevelopment of the Truman Brewery in Brick Lane, London, has been approved despite significant opposition from residents and local campaign groups. The Labour government has overridden plans adopted by Tower Hamlets council that would have created 350 houses, scrapping them in favour of the data centre, offices and a mere 44 homes, of which only 11 will be classed as affordable and only six available for social rent, in an area with a council housing waiting list of over 26,500 households.
Working class communities will pay the cost of the data centre stampede unless there is organised resistance and campaigns against data centres are building up. Fears about the development of mass surveillance capacity and about AI technology creating unemployment – both very real threats to the working class – are forcing opposition to them. Capital must grow to survive, and AI technology is the latest gamble for finance capital as it tries to solve its global crisis of profitability. For us, it is a new front in the fight against capitalism, and one which we must rally to in order to preserve liveable conditions on our planet.
Alex Camden
