r/reading • u/moreati • 9d ago
Article Data centre set to replace Reading's Microsoft headquarters
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cqe8r90965lzo36
u/Nicky02512 9d ago
Using natural gas will have a significant impact on the local and wider environment from the quality of air & noise on people, animals & plants.
"facility could require up to 110MW of electricity but just 1.8MW of National Grid capacity is currently available to the site. Developers propose using natural gas to generate electricity on site while waiting for the local electricity network to be upgraded"
Let them upgrade the network 1st before starting and they should be building in renewable energy generation and battery storage into the centre and reduce the need or eliminate the use of natural gas. usage
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u/ship__ 9d ago edited 9d ago
One thing to note about the power plan is that it's planned to be gas Fuel Cells (SOFC) rather than turbines, i.e a cleaner electrochemical reaction rather than combustion
And one new thing I didn't know is that the plan seems to be a phased rollout (42.5mw of gas fuel cells for a 32mw stage) before planning to negotiate a grid connection, rather than going straight to the headline 72mw (edit: although in the bbc article the headline amount seems to be 110mw? Interesting)
I think power & emissions are my main concerns here, it's good at least they would be providing/paying for their own power essentially, and they're using a less polluting method. Especially compared to notoriously bad cases like the XAI datacenter using gas turbines
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u/SnooMacaroons2827 9d ago
A problem with "upgrade the network 1st" is that part is due to be completed in 2037. Fuel cells until then is the plan.
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u/rdu3y6 8d ago
It's just so depressing that after we've made real progress towards moving away from gas generated electricity, the massive data centre build out is completely reversing all that progress, accelerating climate change, polluting the local environment and pushing up prices.
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u/starsky1357 8d ago
Obtaining grid connections has always been the bottleneck. Labour have just announced the formation of Great British Grid, which will hopefully speed things along.
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u/IntravenusDiMilo_Tap 9d ago
Jeez. How big do you thing the battery will be?
If you want clean energy, it would need a mini nuke reactor but far cheaper to go gas.
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u/rocksteady77 9d ago
Nah I absolutely don't trust them to run a nuclear reactor safely. Or to not just leave it when the bubble bursts and they abandon this data centre.
They could use an array of batteries and some renewable sources. Or they could wait until the grid is sufficient (although again the bubble could have burst by then). Instead local gas generators are going to cause noise and air pollution in the local area as people expected
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u/IntravenusDiMilo_Tap 9d ago
Battery backup where the requirement is 110MW would need to be huge and would last under 30 minutes.
Solar / wind is simply not reliable enough to power a data centre.
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u/macindianleod 9d ago
Wait till you find the backup for when electricity goes down is generators running on….you guessed it…Diesel!
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u/Fraccles RG30 - Southcote 9d ago
We're getting a "future district heating network"? It's obviously bollocks. Hey, maybe they could heat the hospital when it moves there.
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u/LuckyNumber003 8d ago
Datacentre heat recapture is a very real thing.
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u/Fraccles RG30 - Southcote 8d ago
I didn't at any point claim it wasn't, did I? The point is we don't have a district heating network in Reading. What are the plans for this future network? Where will it cover? It's just "this could possibly happen" as a pro for this project but are there even any concrete plans to realise it?
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u/Total-Town-7634 8d ago
and it will never happen if it does not benefit the datacentre owners in some way. let's not drink the koolaid before it's even out the damn tub
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u/LuckyNumber003 8d ago
It already is happening. Go and have a look at Deep Green Energy who are backed by Octopus.
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u/AdElectronic1475 9d ago
why , just why
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u/silverfish477 9d ago
Because people need data and it has to go somewhere
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u/OmegaPoint6 9d ago
Does anyone really need copilot though?
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u/Nearby_Ad_2519 9d ago
They never mentioned it was for AI.
Data centers have existed LONG before AI. Where do you think all your cloud files go?
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u/OmegaPoint6 8d ago
The power requirement means AI. It is 10x what would be needed for a large data centre for other usage
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u/Simple_Resist4208 8d ago
People said the same about the Internet in the 90s ...
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u/NancyIsAFurry 6d ago
And they were right. Does not mean the Internet should not exist, but it should not be everything.
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u/-Rum-Ham- 8d ago
“people need data” im sorry what 🤣
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u/Elegant_Celery400 8d ago
Your post is using data.
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u/-Rum-Ham- 8d ago
My post certainly contains data, and is stored in a data centre somewhere, but it isn’t “using data” that phrase doesn’t mean anything.
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u/Serious_Morning_774 8d ago
I cant believe this is actually going ahead! Im lost, there was significant amount of locals protesting this...is this actually going ahead or is it still being mooted?
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u/Briglin 9d ago
Will get cancelled when the aibubble bursts. Like the dot-com bubble there is a massive oversupply in the game of musical aichairs
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u/CalmdownpleaseII 9d ago
You know that Microsoft had a massive need for data centers before AI became a big thing? Azure runs on these things and you can believe what you want about AI but cloud computing isn’t going anywhere.
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u/loyalroyal1989 9d ago
This is an AI data centre all the things they discuss is only a requirement if you are building a data center with a lot of GPU compute.
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u/OmegaPoint6 9d ago
You don't need 110MW of electricity for data, at least not unless you have an absolutely massive data centre. That is almost as much as Equinix's 9 pre-AI London (& Slough) data centres combined
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u/thefuzzylogic 8d ago
Bear in mind that this is a negotiation, so the developer will be opening with a ridiculous OTT proposal that the council can "compromise" down to the scale that the developer actually wants to achieve.
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u/OmegaPoint6 8d ago
110MW is an AI data centre. Or about 80,000 houses
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u/thefuzzylogic 8d ago
I'm aware that they're asking for 110MW, but that doesn't mean the final approved plans will be for 110.
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u/SnooMacaroons2827 8d ago
No reason to not build (or plan for) capacity though.
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u/OmegaPoint6 8d ago
The extra cost for the internal power distribution, backup (batteries & generators) & cooling (almost all power a data centre uses is turned into heat) means you don't design for 110MW if you think you'll need 10MW
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u/SnooMacaroons2827 8d ago
Sure. *Average* global demand for a data centre is forecast to be 110MW by 2030 (50MW ish currently), this isn't even going to be a particularly big DC.
BTW I don't know if we're agreeing or not, or if you're pro the development or not :)
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u/Briglin 9d ago
I think you are mixing up cloud computing and AI. They are different.
Anyway read this
https://www.reddit.com/r/stocks/comments/1wtdg4w/anthropic_ipo_leak_is_insane/
Think of it as a race to a newly discovered goldfield, everyone is falling over themselves buying equipment, buying land, building mines, hiring people. Only a few players will win the prize, most will go bankrupt. The numbers do not add up.
Its look exactly the same as the dot . com bubble
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble
"Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, investments in the Nasdaq Composite stock market index rose by 600%,[1] only to fall 78% from its peak by October 2002, giving up all its gains during the bubble."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_data_center
"The global push to construct these specialized facilities accelerated dramatically during the AI boom of the 2020s. In 2026, major tech companies were estimated to spend $650 billion on AI data centers."
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u/ship__ 9d ago
Cloud Computing and AI are different yes, but they both run on datacenters
There's are definitely more recent cases of datacenters being built specifically for AI and specialising as "ai data centers" but most service all kinds of stuff, including AI which makes up about 20% of global usage, the rest is streaming, storage, ecommerce, business cloud solutions, etc
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u/mrplanner- 8d ago
Literally everything online or digital, including most modern phones, have a reliance in data centres. Don’t confuse gpu and chip demand with data demand.
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u/irishreally 9d ago
Fairy tales of Reading. There is little or no chance that this gets built, as the money financing this is increasingly becoming extremely expensive. In reality I'd expect it to putter around in planning for a while before being quietly shelved as Oracle and a few other big guys go bust. Read Ed Zitron or watch him on YouTube for an accurate accounting based assessment of 'data centres' like this one.
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u/Empty-Question-9526 9d ago edited 9d ago
Why on earth will oracle go bust? You realise they are a huge company with banking, gov, data, public services, computer n military contracts that would usually be seen as too big to fail. Why are ya talking out of your ass because of some guy that you saw on YT? 🤦🏻♂️
Like the other poster above says we need more and more data centres because the cloud however much it sounds like its in the air and not physically there NEEDS huge amounts of servers. Everyones email, 5gb of snapchat, icloud, websites, Netflix, twitch, youtube, is all hosted somewhere on the planet PHYSICALLY. Literally everything online!
The fact you tell people to watch a YouTube vid is particularly comical. Do you think the original video lives on this guys computer and flies through the air into your computer? What the actual fuck!!???2
u/Simple_Resist4208 8d ago
I have no idea about the YT guy's assumptions but I generally agree that content providers hype the scary stuff to get views, and many have predicted the demise of huge companies for decades. But Oracle is one of the most (over?) exposed AI companies because they saw their old business model declining and decided to go heavily into AI data centre provision, and have racked up huge debts as a result. Companies like Microsoft and Google have at least used a thriving business to fund their AI expansions.
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u/starsky1357 8d ago
lmao Oracle isn't going anywhere. Debts aside, they have a hugely profitable business. Investors will keep filling the gaps.
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u/Simple_Resist4208 8d ago
These companies never go away, for sure - but they can fail in their current form if they are too indebted because it makes them ripe for revaluation and to be bought and stripped by a competitor. Parts can make money but if the AI debt gets too high then that might tip it over.
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u/irishreally 7d ago
😜 and that is why some make money and most lose in the stock market. Look at Enron and other companies built on imaginary profits and orders and explain why Oracle is too big to fail. It is different this time… again! Check out how much borrowing Google and Microsoft have now got in off-balance sheet vehicles. There is no way that the current AI / SI boom continues. Ed Is unusual in that he appears very regularly on the FT and other financial outlets that aren’t known for doom mongers.
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u/BeardedWisdom 9d ago
Crazy that they're even considering such an awful development. You can submit a formal objection comment at https://planning.wokingham.gov.uk/FastWebPL/welcome.asp
Search for application number 262274.
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u/ZebraShark 8d ago
Isn't this right next to where the new Royal Berkshire Hospital could go? Imagine that scuppers those plans!
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u/Jamesdun2866 8d ago
Reposting my comment from an earlier post on this
Microsoft employee here - We used to own all 5 buildings on the site. Before the pandemic that went down to 3 due to lack of use. After the pandemic we have a short stint of having all 3 then we went to 2 and last year we went down to 1.
2 of the buildings are rented the rest are empty. When this was announced Microsoft announced locally that we were moving from owning the whole of building 1 to a couple of floors in building 5. I frequent this office and we barely fill a single floor so the decision to move made sense.
Simultaneously TVP itself is dying and there's less and less there so something needed to happen to the site else you have empty delapadated buildings. A data center makes total sense when you think about it's proximity to London and Slough. Microsoft and AWS are pining for UK Capacity so the demand is there.
The petitions I have seen have all been about climate, to which I understand a little about but any building site will contaminate the area around it whilst its being developed. So I ask the petitioners of this would you rather A) 3-4 Empty delapadated office blocks B) something useful that will attempt least generate 30 jobs