We need more digital infrastructure – we need the data centre. We also need to build and operate it better and perhaps, as importantly, it is time we all understood a little more about what sits behind the digital world we now take for granted.
Take a moment to think about how much of your life now depends on the internet.
You might have started the day by checking the weather on your phone, reading the news, sending a message, checking your bank account or asking an AI assistant a question. You may have streamed music on the way to work, joined a video meeting, ordered something online or shared a photograph with friends. And, if you’re anything like the rest of us, you may have taken a perfectly innocent video of the family pet doing something ridiculous and posted it across several social media platforms.
None of that feels particularly remarkable any more. It is simply how we live.
But behind every one of those activities sits a remarkable amount of physical infrastructure. The phone in your hand is only the visible end of the chain. Information has to be transmitted, processed, stored, replicated, secured and delivered, often across multiple networks and locations. The services we experience as being “in the cloud” ultimately depend on buildings full of physical servers, storage systems, networking equipment, power infrastructure and cooling systems.
In other words, the internet may be digital, but its footprint is decidedly physical.
From Big Data to Big Data Centres
There is a useful way of looking at just how quickly this has happened. In little more than 15 years, we’ve gone from Big Data to Big Data Centres.
Big Data was the buzzword of the early 2010s, reflecting the explosion in the amount of information being created and collected. The conversation was about how organisations could store it, analyse it and extract value from it. What we perhaps didn’t appreciate at the time was that all that data had to live somewhere, be processed somewhere and ultimately be delivered from somewhere.
Today, that “somewhere” increasingly means sophisticated, energy-intensive data centres.
We have spent years talking about the cloud as though it somehow removed the physical problem. It didn’t. It simply moved much of the physical infrastructure somewhere we couldn’t see it.
And that matters because we are now seeing a growing backlash against the infrastructure that makes our digital lives possible.
The backlash is understandable
Across the United States, communities are increasingly challenging new data-centre developments. Concerns about electricity consumption, water use, noise, land, grid capacity, environmental impact and the benefits delivered to local communities are becoming significant planning and political issues. Scotland is now having a similar conversation, with the Scottish Government introducing greater scrutiny of large-scale data-centre proposals and recognising the need to balance economic opportunity with energy, climate and community considerations.
The backlash should not simply be dismissed as hostility towards technology. There are legitimate questions being asked, and the industry needs to answer them properly.
The data-centre sector cannot expect communities to accept major developments simply because they are told the facilities are necessary or because developers point to the jobs they will create. For some large-scale facilities, permanent employment can be relatively modest compared with the amount of land, electricity and supporting infrastructure involved. “Jobs” on its own is therefore not a sufficient social contract.
The industry needs to demonstrate wider and lasting value through responsible use of energy and water, efficient design, sensible locations, investment in local infrastructure and supply chains, environmental stewardship, transparency and meaningful community benefit.
But there is another part of this debate that receives much less attention.
Who is creating the demand?
The answer is uncomfortable because it is not simply Big Tech.
It is us.
The number of people using the internet continues to grow, with the International Telecommunication Union estimating that around six billion people — approximately 74% of the world’s population — were online in 2025. At the same time, the amount of data being created and processed globally continues to increase at extraordinary speed.
We have moved from occasionally using the internet to living much of our lives through it.
We store photographs rather than printing them. We stream films rather than buying physical media. We use cloud applications rather than software installed on our own computers. We expect our emails, files and photographs to be available everywhere, all the time. We communicate through video and messaging platforms, use online banking, rely on GPS and increasingly ask AI systems to generate text, images, analysis and answers for us.
Each of those activities creates demand for infrastructure.
Consider that innocent cat video. It may take only seconds to record and upload, but the resulting file needs to be transmitted, stored and made available to potentially millions of people. If it is posted to several platforms, there may be multiple copies held across different systems. If it becomes popular, content delivery networks will distribute it across different locations so people can watch it quickly and reliably.
The individual action is trivial. The infrastructure required to support billions of individual actions is anything but.
This is one of the great blind spots in how we understand the digital world. We have become accustomed to thinking of the internet as something that simply exists, rather like an invisible utility. We expect unlimited access to data, services, entertainment and computing power without necessarily considering the physical resources required to provide it.
Digital consumption is still consumption. The fact that we cannot see what we are consuming does not mean that it consumes no resources.
We need a better definition of digital literacy
We have become much better at teaching people how to use the internet safely. Digital literacy increasingly means understanding online scams, protecting personal information, spotting misinformation, recognising manipulation and understanding how algorithms can influence what we see.
All of that is important.
But there is another dimension to digital literacy that is largely missing: understanding the physical infrastructure behind the digital experience.
We should not expect every internet user to understand how a data centre works or calculate the energy associated with every search they make. Nor should using the internet become a guilt exercise. Digital technology delivers enormous social and economic benefits, and many of the services we now depend upon are genuinely transformative.
But people should understand that there is a physical world behind the screen. Perhaps digital literacy should evolve through three stages. First, we learn how to use digital technology. Then we learn how to use it safely and responsibly. Increasingly, we should also understand what it takes to make that technology available to us.
That would lead to a much more informed debate about data centres.
The current conversation can sometimes sound as though data-centre demand has been imposed upon society by technology companies. The reality is more complicated. The demand is being created by billions of consumers, businesses and organisations using digital services every day. We cannot reasonably demand an always-on digital world and simultaneously behave as though the infrastructure required to deliver it is somebody else’s problem.
Demand means infrastructure
None of this changes the fundamental reality that more infrastructure is required.
The International Energy Agency estimates that data centres consumed around 415 terawatt-hours of electricity globally in 2024 and expects that figure to more than double to around 945 TWh by 2030, with AI expected to be the biggest driver of growth.
That is a significant increase, but it is also a reflection of where the global economy is heading. AI, cloud computing, digital services and data-intensive applications are not going to disappear because building the infrastructure to support them is difficult.
The more successful digital technology becomes, the greater the demand for the infrastructure beneath it.
That means the answer cannot simply be “build fewer data centres”. It has to be about building the right infrastructure, in the right places, in the right way.
And that is where the industry has an opportunity to do much better.
We need to innovate, not simply scale
There is a tendency to think of data-centre growth as a straightforward equation: demand increases, therefore we build more buildings and put more servers in them.
But the technology and the industry are capable of much more imaginative solutions.
China provides an interesting example. Off the coast of Shanghai, a commercial underwater data-centre project has begun operations, with a planned capacity of 24MW. The facility is powered by offshore wind and takes advantage of the natural cooling properties of seawater. According to Chinese authorities, the approach can significantly reduce energy requirements compared with conventional land-based facilities.
It would be wrong to suggest that underwater data centres are about to become the standard solution. They introduce their own engineering and environmental challenges and will only make sense in particular locations.
But that is not really the point.
The interesting thing is that engineers are asking a different question: rather than simply finding more energy to cool increasingly powerful computers, can we rethink where and how computing infrastructure operates?
That is precisely the kind of thinking the wider industry needs.
Better cooling. More efficient hardware. Smarter use of renewable energy. Better use of existing grid infrastructure. Heat recovery. More efficient workloads. More thoughtful site selection. Greater transparency about water consumption. And potentially entirely new approaches to where computing infrastructure is located.
The challenge is not simply to build more. It is to build better.
The industry needs to earn trust
This is where the conversation between the data centre operators, planners and communities needs to change.
The industry should not be asking people to trust data centres simply because the technology is important. It should be providing enough information for communities to make informed judgements.
How much electricity will a facility require? Where will that electricity come from? What impact will it have on the local grid? How much water will be used? What cooling technology will be employed? What will the noise impact be? What happens to the heat? What environmental standards will be applied? What will the local community gain? And what happens at the end of the facility’s operational life?
Those are not anti-technology questions. They are sensible questions about major infrastructure.
At vXtream, we believe that world-class digital infrastructure and responsible operation are not competing objectives. They have to be part of the same proposition.
Clients expect their infrastructure to be secure, resilient, available and high performing. Those expectations are not going away, and nor should they. But the infrastructure supporting those services also has an environmental and social footprint, and responsible operators need to understand and minimise it.
That means looking beyond simply keeping the servers running. It means thinking about efficiency, energy, cooling, infrastructure utilisation and the wider consequences of the choices we make. It also means being transparent about those choices.
Everyone has a part to play
There is a temptation in debates like this to divide the world into two camps: the technology industry on one side and concerned communities on the other.
That is too simplistic.
Governments and planners have a responsibility to establish sensible frameworks that protect communities and resources while allowing essential infrastructure to develop. Operators have a responsibility to build and run that infrastructure responsibly. Technology companies have a responsibility to innovate and reduce the environmental impact of their services.
And consumers have a responsibility too.
Not to stop using technology or feel guilty about watching a film or posting a photograph, but to recognise that our digital lives are powered by a physical infrastructure that requires resources.
We have become accustomed to treating digital services as unlimited and invisible. Perhaps it is time to understand them a little better.
We wouldn’t expect unlimited electricity without thinking about the power stations, networks and resources required to generate and deliver it. We wouldn’t expect unlimited water without understanding that reservoirs, treatment plants and pipes have to exist somewhere.
The internet deserves the same level of understanding.
The data centre nobody sees
The irony is that the people arguing about whether we should build more data centres are often the same people who depend upon them most heavily. That is not hypocrisy. It is simply the consequence of technology becoming so seamless that we no longer see the infrastructure beneath it.
The solution is not to make that infrastructure visible by building indiscriminately. Nor is it to pretend that the demand does not exist.
We need more digital infrastructure. We need to build and operate it better. And we need better education and transparency about what that infrastructure actually means.
The industry has a responsibility to explain itself. Governments have a responsibility to regulate intelligently. Communities have a right to ask difficult questions. And consumers should recognise that their demand for digital services is part of the equation too.
The next time you stream a film, upload a photograph or ask an AI assistant a question, there is no need to feel guilty. But perhaps spare a thought for what happens after you press send.
Because the internet may feel weightless and invisible, but somewhere, someone is running the machines that make it possible. And increasingly, the challenge for all of us is to make sure that the physical infrastructure behind our digital lives is as responsible, resilient and sustainable as the services it delivers
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Photo by Christian Medina on Unsplash