Google has poured $1bn into its UK data centre subsidiary, City AM can reveal, in the clearest sign yet that the tech giant is eyeing major expansion of its compute power in Britain.
The £775m cash injection was this week filed to Companies House for the same company which controls Google’s Waltham Cross data centre, the first data centre site wholly owned and operated by Google in the UK, which was opened earlier this year.
In September, Google pledged to invest £5bn into the UK economy, in a commitment timed to coincide with the state visit of Donald Trump.
The tech giant said the investment, which comprises capital spending and research and development over the next two years, will bolster its AI-powered projects in science and healthcare, creating more than 8,000 jobs.
The fresh $1bn cash deployment is an early indication that the construction of more owned and operated data centres is set to form a major component of the £5bn pledge, which Chancellor Rachel Reeves described as a “vote of confidence in the UK.”
Google did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Tech giants battle for cloud compute market share
The new data centre in Waltham Cross, just north of London, was first announced by Google in January last year with the project set to cost nearly £800m.
A planning application to turn the 33-acre field into a data centre was first submitted to the Borough of Broxbourne in 2018 by a now-defunct company called STX-10. A Google subsidiary later acquired the land in 2020 for £55m and progressed with the development.
The plans suffered a series of setbacks before eventually reaching completion.
When the first planning application for the site was submitted, Thames Water warned it had “identified an inability of the existing water network infrastructure to accommodate the needs of this development proposal”, while a utilities report found the local power supply was inadequate and a new 6km-long cable would have to be dug underground (including drilling under the M25) to connect up to a second National Grid substation.
Google has been battling to gain a foothold in the UK’s cloud market, and has so far lagged behind the likes of Microsoft and Amazon, which are each thought to control as much as a 40 per cent market share, according to a study by the UK’s competition regulator.
Blackrock this year also announced a major investment into UK data centres, with the New York asset manager pledging to spend £500m.
There were more than three dozen planning applications for data centres in the UK in 2024, a 40 per cent jump on the previous year according to an analysis by UKTN, as tech firms raced to build enough compute to power the growing demands of AI.
