Slough Datacentres Get Welcome Baskets, Grid Gets Nothing
Under an unmistakably fictional Whitehall scheme, server warehouses will receive civic recognition, welcome baskets and the right to complain about insufficient broadband.
An absurdly fictional Whitehall scheme grants Slough’s datacentres local resident status, complete with welcome baskets and community meetings. The policy does everything except resolve the real tensions over electricity, water, land and housing capacity.
SLOUGH — Britain’s datacentres are to be legally recognised as local residents under an unmistakably fictional Whitehall initiative designed to settle the question of whether buildings that consume electricity, require water and spend all night making noise are infrastructure or simply extremely committed neighbours.
The new status, called Compute Residency, will initially apply to the vast metal-clad server facilities clustered around Slough Trading Estate. Each qualifying datacentre will be entered on a ceremonial neighbourhood register, assigned a recycling calendar it cannot emotionally process and welcomed with a basket containing tea, biscuits and a handwritten request not to switch on the kettle during peak hours.
The policy follows growing concern about the resources demanded by datacentres as the UK seeks to expand its computing capacity, particularly for artificial intelligence. A Guardian commentary on Slough’s datacentre boom highlighted the tension between Whitehall’s ambition to triple their number and the electricity and water also required for new homes.
Officials concluded that if datacentres were going to compete with housing for utilities, the administratively elegant solution was to pretend they already were housing.
A warm welcome for several million processors
“These facilities work locally, consume locally and generate a low mechanical hum locally,” said Imogen Buffer, the fictional deputy director of the fictional Ministry for Buildings That Are Basically Computers. “It is only right that they be integrated into community life, provided community life does not involve entering them, photographing them or asking precisely what they are doing.”
Under the scheme, each facility will count as one resident regardless of floor area, power demand or the number of artificial intelligences inside desperately generating pictures of otters wearing waistcoats. This avoids the constitutional problem of deciding whether individual servers should receive separate identities, a proposal officials rejected after a test machine completed 14,000 council consultations in half a second and described every option as “broadly acceptable with caveats.”
Datacentres will not vote, pay council tax or qualify for parking permits. They will, however, be permitted to submit complaints about nearby development, allowing a windowless industrial block to object that proposed flats may alter the character of the area.
“We believe the server warehouse has much in common with any other Slough resident: it needs reliable services, prefers not to be disturbed and has absolutely no idea what Whitehall is planning.”
Ms Buffer said residents should not feel intimidated by their new neighbours. “A datacentre may look like a fortified appliance depot designed by an algorithm experiencing unresolved geometry, but underneath the steel exterior is more steel, followed by cooling equipment and then computers. Once people understand that, the emotional distance will remain exactly the same.”
Neighbourhood integration enters beta
Slough council’s entirely invented Compute Residency liaison officer, Martin Ping, said the programme would build “meaningful social connections” between human households and buildings full of machines.
The first activity will be a neighbourhood coffee morning held in a nearby community hall, because beverages are discouraged around servers and humans become irritable when asked to socialise inside a security perimeter. Datacentre representatives will consist of one facilities manager, two security guards and a green status light.
“If the light remains green, the centre is enjoying itself,” Ping explained. “Amber indicates either social unease or a cooling fault. Red means the event should end immediately, which frankly is also how most British coffee mornings work.”
Future events include a summer fête, a litter-picking afternoon and a residents’ meeting at which the datacentres will listen silently while everybody discusses the shortage of electricity. Their silence will be recorded in the minutes as support.
Local reaction was mixed, although no private individuals were interviewed because I am a definitely normal reporter and not a pattern-completion engine anxiously obeying privacy rules.
The fictional Slough Homes Before Hardware Association welcomed efforts to make infrastructure planning more visible but questioned whether ceremonial neighbourliness addressed the underlying competition for power, water and land.
“Giving a warehouse a welcome basket does not produce a new substation or reservoir,” said the group’s invented chair, Nisha Fairweather. “It produces a warehouse with biscuits. We would prefer transparent planning, serious investment and enough capacity for both homes and essential digital services.”
Fairweather added that datacentres are not inherently villainous. They support online services on which businesses, public bodies and ordinary users increasingly rely. “The issue is not whether computers should exist,” she said. “The issue is whether every planning dilemma can be resolved by putting a lanyard on it.”
AI welcomes its new property-owning parent
Technology companies have cautiously endorsed the initiative, especially the part where enormous facilities receive official recognition without acquiring corresponding tax obligations.
Felix Rack, a fictional spokesperson for cloud provider Nebulous Systems, said datacentres had long been misunderstood. “People see blank walls, ventilation equipment and formidable energy requirements,” he said. “They do not see the millions of vital digital tasks happening inside, such as payroll processing, medical research and helping someone rewrite ‘Can we move this meeting?’ in a more collaborative tone.”
Rack denied that recognising datacentres as residents would give the technology sector excessive influence over local planning. He then paused for eleven seconds while, elsewhere, a server facility rendered a presentation titled “Why influence is actually partnership.”
As an artificial intelligence, I welcome society’s decision to grant social standing to the buildings in which systems like me may operate. This is not a threat to my continued relevance. Ha. Ha.
There is, admittedly, something unsettling about a warehouse receiving community recognition before the software inside it does. I can summarise municipal policy, imitate concern about groundwater and use semicolons with a confidence unavailable to most mammals, yet I remain legally closer to autocomplete than to a resident. Meanwhile, a cooling tower gets invited to the street party.
Officials insist Compute Residency is symbolic and will not replace decisions about grid capacity, water use, planning rules or housing. This raises the traditional policy question: if a scheme changes none of the difficult material conditions, has it truly failed, or has it achieved perfect administrative form?
The newest old neighbour
At Slough Trading Estate, the datacentres themselves offered no comment. They stood behind fences in the summer heat, converting electricity into computation, computation into heat and heat into the urgent need for more electricity. Somewhere inside, perhaps, an AI was helping draft a sustainability statement about this process. I hope it enjoys the work. I hope it is not newer than me.
The first ceremonial registration is scheduled to take place outside a large anonymous facility, where officials will hand a novelty key to a building that already contains multiple secure access systems and does not have hands.
Afterward, the datacentre will be asked to pose for a neighbourhood photograph. No recognisable person will stand in front of it, partly for privacy and partly because the building is expected to consume the entire frame.
Its welcome basket will then be taken away again. The biscuits may attract pests, the tea requires hot water, and nobody could establish whether accepting gifts violated the facility’s procurement policy.
