A north Devon market town of roughly 6,000 people is being asked to host a 1.5 gigawatt AI data centre on 850 acres of farmland. Ireland's data centre boom is the test case for what comes next.
In north Devon, a market town of 6,000 is being asked to host an AI facility the size of a gas-fired power station. The disproportion is the real story.
XLinks, the company behind the proposal, has framed the project as one of the largest of its kind in Europe: a 1.5-gigawatt AI data centre on roughly 850 acres near Great Torrington. A 1.5-gigawatt continuous draw is comparable to the output of a modern combined-cycle gas plant, and the developer says it would be enough to power about a million homes. Co-located battery storage would smooth the load, but the headline figure is the same. A single site asking the local grid to host what amounts to an industrial power station's worth of demand, on land that is currently sheep pasture and arable fields.
The residents being asked to absorb that footprint are not waiting to find out what it would feel like. A public consultation meeting in Great Torrington last week filled the venue standing-room only, and when organisers tried to cap attendance at 100, around 200 more people gathered outside. The developer's project site claims 650 to 1,200 jobs and £3.6 billion a year in economic value at a headline cost of £13.8 billion. That is the developer's own number, not an independent assessment, and the consultation is still the consultation: no planning application has been submitted.
What is concentrating the opposition is the local mechanics, not the abstract politics. The proposed site sits inside or next to the North Devon UNESCO Biosphere, a UN designation covering a stretch of north Devon's coast and countryside. Local campaigner Dave Clinch, leading a petition that has gathered around 2,000 signatures, has put the anger in plain terms: the countryside will not come back. Reporting on the campaign has documented a wider cluster of local concerns, from the water and energy infrastructure that residents say the site would strain, to the fire, noise, and visual footprint of a battery storage facility of that scale.
The political geometry is unusual. Torridge's MP, Sir Geoffrey Cox, is opposing the project, an unusual cross-party alignment that has done little to slow the consultation queue. The grid connection, via the Alverdiscott substation route described on the developer's project page, is itself a national-network question: 1.5 gigawatts of new demand in a rural corner of southwest England does not get absorbed by the local substation alone.
The portable warning is Dublin. Ireland's data-centre boom, reported over the last several years, has been linked by consumer groups and grid operators to rising household electricity bills and episodes of grid instability, because the marginal cost of serving a small number of very large industrial users gets spread across domestic and small-business tariffs. The Irish comparison is not a quantified study, and the source making it is advocacy framing, not a regulatory finding. But the political-economy shape is the same: a national AI buildout that wants land, water, and grid headroom, and a small set of communities being asked to supply all three.
That is the bit worth watching. The formal consultation window runs from about 14 July to 11 August, and the next trigger is the planning application itself, which XLinks has not yet filed. If it lands in its current form, Devon becomes the test case for whether communities with limited political leverage can actually refuse to host the visible cost of the AI buildout, or whether the visible costs simply get re-priced into local bills and the local water table no matter what the consultation says.