F E A T U R E

Mark Pestridge, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Telehouse Europe, answers our questions about the evolving role of data centres as critical national infrastructure and their growing importance in the digital economy. He discusses how industry expansion, regulatory changes and public awareness efforts will shape the future of data centres in the UK. ow is the data centre

The data centre industry is building on a year of strong momentum, with further expansion expected as we move towards Summer 2025. As demand for digital infrastructure continues to surge, data centres are reinforcing their role in powering transformation across industries such as healthcare, finance, manufacturing and retail. Recent techUK research highlights an exciting opportunity for data centres to add £ 44 billion to the UK economy by 2035.

This remarkable expansion is fuelled by rapid technological advances, particularly in AI, which are set to accelerate the demand for data centres like never before. Chinese start-up, Deepseek’ s groundbreaking AI model, R1, is one such innovation, which has rapidly made an impact on the market this year, thanks to its cost-effectiveness and performance, rivalling established models like OpenAI’ s GPT-4.

However, making this growth a reality requires the industry to adapt on several fronts: particularly by forging deeper customer relationships, embracing new cooling technologies for AI-driven workloads, delivering low-latency connectivity, and proactively supporting the communities in which they operate.

How will the rise of AI impact data centre cooling, networking and infrastructure requirements?

The explosion of AI will also force data centres to make decisions about cooling technology. According to McKinsey, the demand for AI-ready data centre capacity is projected to grow at 33 % annually up to 2030 in a midrange

www. intelligentdatacentres. com 37