When it comes to artificial intelligence (AI), it is all about the tokens, which are the basic units of AI. They’re the way large language models (LLMs) – the core of AI and therefore behind much recent datacentre expansion – measure inputs and their responses, with their cost measured in fractions of a dollar.
But “token” is also how many datacentre campaigners would characterise the industry’s record stance on community engagement and sustainability. If the industry is to avoid escalation and impacts from protests on build-times and project viability, experts agree there needs to be a shift from a perception of tokenism to a community and socially focused stance.
In part one of this series, we looked at the various groups, from global to grassroots, that actively campaign against datacentre development.
In part two, we look at the datacentre industry’s response to this backlash – namely, the operators, LLM labs, technology suppliers and numerous consultants and other constituents of the supply chain that are almost singularly focused on speed, scale and performance.
From tokens to tokenism
One of the key challenges in datacentre development is not just negative attention but rather the speed and scale of the attention the sector has received.
The ramp-up in interest and scrutiny of datacentres – a relatively unknown but critical corner of the technology industry until recently – is illustrated by the rapid rise in coverage by business-focused media such as The Financial Times. According to data from industry analysts STL, there were approximately 60 FT articles that mentioned datacentres in 2022, which rose to more than 700 in 2025.
“It’s not just that datacentres are getting more attention…a large share of media coverage is increasingly negative, rather than neutral, just informative,” said STL consultant Jonas Topp-Mugglestone on a recent webcast.
A lack of structure
One reason why datacentre operators may have been caught-off guard by the speed and scale of the anti-datacentre backlash is that despite the industry’s almost limitless resources, it remains fragmented. While residents can call on groups such Foxglove, Global Action Plan or Friends of the Earth, the datacentre industry largely lacks a coordinated response, and individual operators often face campaigners unilaterally.
Computer Weekly put that point to Michael Winterson, secretary general at the European Data Centre Association (EUDCA), and asked whether it was the organisation’s role to support operators in increasingly heated local planning fights.
While the EUDCA takes the anti-datacentre pushback seriously, it has to be deliberate about its role and how to allocate its resources in the most effective and efficient way, says Winterson.
“Boundaries are important, because as a trade association, we’re still quite young. We have a staff, but it’s not large. We have a budget, but it’s not huge,” says Winterson. “So, we have to create boundaries regarding how much we can handle, how many plates we can spin. Right now it’s one or two plates, so we have to be focused on where we allocate our resources.”
Lately, those resources have been deployed in direct engagement with EU lawmakers on regulations that impact datacentre operators, such as the European Energy Directive (EED) and a cluster of recently announced plans spanning chips, cloud and energy – including emerging efficiency reporting and labelling for datacentre facilities.
According to Winterson, the EUDCA would need to reorganise and seek new funding to provide the kind of active support to its members that would approximate that provided by campaigning groups to residents and campaigners. “We would have to create a whole new division,” he says. “We’d have to hire the resources; we’d have to seek the membership fees to support a messaging campaign that can be disseminated not just regionally but ultimately globally.”
For now, the EUDCA will provide what support it can to members, including via national datacentre bodies, by building on some existing initiatives.
“There does feel like there’s a gap in terms of a larger organisation to work to support the operators,” he says. “We are going to start dealing with that. We run an annual report and attempt to look at the key issues in front of us but we also have an entire section focused on societal impact.
“Several members have asked for us to grow out that section and start looking at individual use cases, which aggregated together could become a best practice template. So, yes, in that sense, we are going to act, but it would be a tool to be used by either the operators or more local trade associations,” he says
Local datacentre associations
Winterson is keen to point to the role of national datacentre organisations which, as part of any kind of industry wide response, sit between the operators and the EUDCA. The Data Centre Alliance (DCA), the main industry group for operators and suppliers in the UK, has developed a position paper that outlines the steps it believes the UK government needs to take to streamline the deployment of new facilities and help assuage community concerns.
The DCA’s Enabling AI at scale: the infrastructure reality states that: “Without coordinated policy…there is a risk that infrastructure delivery timelines will lag behind AI ambition.”
Venessa Moffat, executive director of the DCA, told Computer Weekly that a lack of clarity from the government on how datacentres are defined and regulated is exacerbating the backlash. “Across the wider government, they’re doing very well. Equally, they’re still working in silos and they still don’t know where to put us,” she says. “They made datacentres critical national infrastructure (CNI). But if you look at the CNI sectors, they’re still not easy to find.”
Moffat explains that as well as working for the datacentre industry, she sees the view from the other side of the fence. “I’m a local councillor. If a datacentre application came into the local council here…they wouldn’t know what to do with it, because there are no instructions.”
The recently released UK National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) restates the need for datacentres nationally and this does give local organisations something to refer to, according to Moffat. But more clarity will improve the process.
“If your outline planning application includes this raft of information, then instead of having this backlash, residents may better understand what the benefits are. The communication is there upfront,” she says.
Slow to act
As well as regional and national datacentre associations, several consultants and advisory organisations also help to shape industry response.
Rose Weinschenk from datacentre certification and advisory firm Uptime Institute says the industry has been relatively slow in its response to the backlash. “We had this window of time to seize the narrative by providing proper information instead of relying on obscurity,” she adds.
The issue of “getting ahead of the problem” extends all the way down from a coherent industry-wide position – Uptime is developing an advisory document on planning and community engagement – to how specific operators should deal with local resistance, according to Weinschenk.
“Many operators would take an approach of ‘decide, announce and defend’ – what we call a DAD strategy – and for people in the communities this really impacted their ability to trust.”
A social charter for datacentres
UK datacentre engineering consultants, Hoare Lea, is one of the more progressive organisations when it comes to how to improve community engagement.
Earlier, this year the group published Powering places: integrated planning strategies for datacentres & communities, which stated that datacentre planning applications are being delayed by an average of 490 days, driven largely by objections related to inadequate community engagement, unclear community benefits, design, infrastructure constraints, and energy use.
The organisation has also developed and published what it describes as a “social charter” for datacentres that outlines six principles that can be used by local authorities and developers to drive greater community engagement. These range from a basic requirement to understand the needs of communities to higher level goals such as “designing in equity and justice”.
Carl Walker, head of societal insights at Hoare Lea, says the speed of current deployments has often pushed proper societal engagement into the background. “The speed is unprecedented, and the scale, which is why they have to take engagement really seriously,” he says. “Engagement needs to be brought in right at the beginning, and it should be right the way through the process. It should be an absolute priority because if it’s an afterthought, then that risk will cost you money.”
Better sustainability
As well as improved frameworks and mechanisms for community and societal engagement, operators are also working to ensure their facilities are more sustainable. Mihir Nandkeolyar, director of technology strategy at equipment supplier Johnson Controls, argues that operators now realise that improving sustainability can speed up deployments by reducing the likelihood of community pushback.
“It’s the speed and the necessity to win this race which is driving choices to do whatever it takes to make the datacentre acceptable,” he says. “So, we’ve got one client who is basically saying that even if they wanted to use water evaporation as part of their cooling strategy, it would delay projects. For that reason, they’re designing scenarios that would reject heat without the evaporation of water. So, in fact, being sustainable is part of being faster.”
Future scenarios
According to Uptime’s Weinschenk, in flashpoint areas for new datacentre projects, community groups increasingly want more than societal frameworks or environmental pledges.
“This is going to be, in my opinion, the era of binding contracts, because there have been a lot of situations where the industry opted for more sentiment-driven campaigns,” she says. “What people want right now is a guarantee that agreements made will be honoured. People want guarantees that their voices are being heard and at least some of their demands are being met.”
Weinschenk believes there will be an increase in signed Community Benefit Agreements which codify the datacentre operator’s environmental and societal commitments and provide reassurance to local communities.
Tokens will continue to be critical to the future of the datacentre industry, especially as the shift from training to inference and agentic AI continues at pace. However, it is also clear that tokens do not have to equal tokenism. The expertise exists in the industry to build out in a way that is sympathetic to community needs and environmentally responsible. Whether this is all achievable against the backdrop of the AI arms race, however, is another question.
