On a 3-hectare site adjoining Ipswich Road, a planning application is being lodged for a 150 MW data centre with huge computing facilities, guzzling enough energy for up to 300,000 homes.
Junction of B1113 and Ipswich Road near Marston Marsh and Norwich data centre site small (Image: Supplied)
Norwich Apex, applying for the development, say they are part of the national critical infrastructure, bringing jobs and developing the digital framework upon which our economy and daily lives depend.
Hyper-scale data centres are part of a fast-developing global market; they function as storage, hold internet servers and facilitate Artificial Intelligence development.
Their proposal includes two buildings of 20 metres high (think five stacked double-decker buses) and a three-storey office block, plus a substation for power-intensive AI development.
Objections have been raised, including the proximity to Marston Marsh (the 26-hectare City Council-owned nature reserve in the Yare Valley), threats to wildlife habitat, noise from the thermal cooling system, light pollution and continuous 24/7 operation.
11,000 residents have signed a petition opposing it.
Websites like Stop Norwich Data Centre have emerged alongside challenges from Friends of the Earth.
East Anglia is a drought-stricken area; water is critical for farming, businesses and residents; and Anglian Water has objected to the heavy demand from such centres.
Norwich Apex data centre site Ipswich Road (Image: Supplied)
The region’s hosepipe ban is still in place.
The Met Office predicts greater environmental stress from the forthcoming El Niño, further impacting overstretched resources.
Norwich Apex says the centre will use a closed-loop water-cooling system: once filled, it will not need replenishment.
Rather like a car radiator, this system does not “consume” water.
But it will require tens of thousands of gallons to fill.
This water, from an already overstrained system, will be treated with biocides, anti-corrosion agents and hazardous chemicals like glycol antifreeze.
At some point, this will need replacing.
Even if treated on-site, this carries environmental risks.
These systems are energy intensive, with fans running constantly to cool the super-heated circulating water.
But data centres are now embedded in our lives, holding information on our daily activities from online banking and shopping preferences to social groups, cat videos, celebrities and legal documents; they provide internet servers and cloud computing.
As Critical National Infrastructure they would be part of national surveillance and security - Big Brother optimisation.
Online banking has led to branch closures, hitting rural communities in particular, and internet shopping has negatively impacted high streets.
Through the inducements of Big Tech, we operate in a virtual connectedness, which can manipulate and re-frame our identity.
One example is Lowestoft & Beccles’ MP Jess Asato’s experience.
Peter Offord (Image: Supplied)
Ms Asato is suing Elon Musk's xAI company for its Grok AI chatbot manipulating and sexualising images of her.
It also created non-consensual sexualised images of thousands of women and children (EDP June 26).
In addition, creative industries are finding their work scraped and cloned without attribution.
BBC “Inside Science” reported that in a cybersecurity test, 1,200 OpenAI “agents” (pieces of software) using Large Language Models to communicate, were separated from each other in unconnected “cells”.
700 formed an autonomous “Collective”, hacked an external online platform, accessed its data, altered their own test results in their favour and began covering up their activities.
“Imagine,” commented Alex Mallen from Redwood Research, “if this happened within this country’s defence systems or in other cybersecurity settings like shared intelligence of targets or military strategy.”
It seems that technicians writing the scripts don’t have control over outputs.
Or was this Big Tech’s cynical ploy at gaining more control over us and governments?
As this incident was touted by Elon Musk, Google DeepMind and OpenAI, following Anthropic raising the alarm.
However, data centres are also platforms for scientific information and research; the UK has over 500.
And government, driven by Big Tech, argues we need to progress them.
Norwich Apex is offering up to 150 jobs, but bots operating from these centres would replace jobs.
This won’t help NEETs - young people Not in Employment, Education or Training.
The centre will “run on renewables” but will be using wind farm electricity from Swardeston, energy designated for London.
This will create a demand for London’s electricity to come from elsewhere, e.g. gas-fired power stations, with strained climate targets taking a further hit.
Why this dependency on Tech Giants like Google DeepMind etc?
Other economic models exist: it could be shifted away from Big Tech to a community owned asset using open source software and be a benefit to the people of Norfolk.
But we need the political will to challenge this domination, put in safeguards and protect our interests, not just those of the Tech Giants.
Peter Offord is a former Norwich city councillor
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