UK data centres will create a quarter of the jobs the industry promised: think tank
Key Points
- Think tank Verdant puts permanent jobs from planned UK data centres at 10,400, against techUK's 40,200
- Twenty planned schemes averaged 1.2 operational jobs per megawatt against techUK's assumed 8.5
- The Cambois campus in Northumberland will create 400 permanent jobs from 720 megawatts of capacity
- The government's 3,400 Lanarkshire jobs figure was scaled from Cambois and includes just 333 on-site roles
- Data centres make up 73 gigawatts of a 125-gigawatt grid connections queue, against peak UK demand of 45 gigawatts
Planned UK data centres will create around 10,400 permanent jobs rather than the 40,200 the industry has claimed, according to a new briefing from think tank Verdant.
The briefing, written by economist James Meadway and published on Wednesday (9 September), examined the employment figures behind the government’s case for a rapid build-out of data centre capacity in the UK.
Industry body techUK has said that growing UK data centre capacity will create 40,200 direct operational jobs by 2035, with a further 18,200 construction jobs over the same period.
The government has cited the figure in responses to Parliament and in written evidence to the Environmental Audit Committee.
Verdant said the techUK number rests on four assumptions rather than a count of actual employment.
techUK assumed a typical site employs 54 staff and draws 6.35 megawatts, producing a ratio of 8.5 jobs per megawatt, which it then applied to an assumed 450 UK sites.
The 54-staff figure came from splitting the difference between two estimates, one of which a Data Centre Council member reasoned as “usually around 3-4 people per shift, and 2 or 3 shifts per day, plus admin etc, so around 20 per site”. The other came from dividing Equinix’s total headcount by its number of data centres.
Verdant matched sourced employment figures to sourced capacity figures for 20 planned UK schemes, which together account for 5,535 megawatts of capacity.
The capacity-weighted average across those schemes came to 1.2 operational jobs per megawatt, seven times lower than the techUK assumption.
Adjusting for the size distribution of schemes in the pipeline lifted that figure to 1.6 jobs per megawatt, which the think tank used to reach its 10,400 total.
Applying the same evidence to data centres already operating in the UK gave around 4,400 direct jobs today, against the 24,300 techUK claims for the existing estate.
The largest schemes recorded the lowest ratios. The QTS campus at Cambois in Northumberland, backed by Blackstone, will have 720 megawatts of capacity and is expected to create 400 permanent operational jobs, or 0.56 jobs per megawatt.
The 1,000-megawatt Elsham Tech Park in North Lincolnshire is expected to employ 800 people, and the 550-megawatt Ravenscraig AI Campus in North Lanarkshire 440. At the other end, the 90-megawatt LON6 site at Iver Heath in Buckinghamshire is expected to employ 539, or 5.99 jobs per megawatt.
Verdant said six of the largest schemes in the pipeline, together representing close to 900 megawatts, publish a construction figure or an economy-wide claim but no operational headcount at all.
The briefing also examined the government’s claim that the Lanarkshire AI Growth Zone would support more than 3,400 jobs.
A Freedom of Information request by Action to Protect Rural Scotland found that the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology had derived the figure by scaling up numbers from the Cambois scheme, 150 miles away, and applying a multiplier of 1.5 to 1.6.
When APRS reconstructed the calculation for Lanarkshire’s projected 500 megawatts, it found 333 operational jobs at the site, 1,000 temporary construction jobs and 2,066 induced jobs in the wider economy.
A Parliamentary Question later established that the induced jobs “could be anywhere, and not necessarily in Lanarkshire, or even Scotland”.
Verdant said that with £8.2 billion of expected investment, the Lanarkshire scheme amounted to roughly £25 million for each permanent job at the site.
The think tank compared the jobs-per-megawatt ratio with other large UK installations using figures from the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero and the Office for National Statistics. UK steelworks support 291 direct jobs per megawatt of average load and car plants 400, against 8.6 for the existing data centre estate on Verdant’s estimate and 47.3 on techUK’s own claim.
Hospitals and health facilities support 3,626 jobs per megawatt and schools, colleges and universities 4,534.
The briefing set the employment figures against pressure on the electricity grid. Ofgem said in July 2026 that contracted demand in the connections queue rose from 41 gigawatts to 125 gigawatts between November 2024 and June 2025, of which around 73 gigawatts were data centres across roughly 315 projects.
Peak electricity demand in Great Britain in 2025/26 was 45 gigawatts. Ofgem is consulting on a Data Centre Commitment Fee of between £237,500 and £712,500 per megawatt, refunded when a project connects and forfeited if it leaves the queue early.
Data centres accounted for 65% of all grid electricity consumed in Slough in 2024, 28% in Hillingdon and 18% in Tower Hamlets. The London Assembly found in December 2025 that housing developments in Ealing, Hillingdon and Hounslow were being offered grid connections well into the 2030s, with some told to wait until 2037.
Verdant called for a pause on consent for new large-scale data centres until a national assessment framework is in place, for electricity and water availability to become binding conditions of consent, and for a public consultation on the UK’s AI infrastructure.
The government rejected a pause when Green Party leader Zack Polanski called for one in August. “A pause on building new data centres would simply send investment and good jobs abroad,” a government spokesperson said. “It would be a disaster for jobs and national security.”
