The UK is fast-tracking datacentres. It cannot say what they are for.

The UK has put datacentres in a privileged planning tier. They have been critical national infrastructure since 2024, and from January they have been fast-tracked past local committees under the Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project scheme. The department that granted those privileges, DSIT, told the Guardian on Wednesday that it did "not hold the requested information" on who runs the largest sites or what they are used for. The department has since been dissolved.

The request was filed by Global Action Plan, an environmental charity. DSIT has been wound up as part of the July 2026 Machinery of Government changes. The FoI answer now sits with a ministry that no longer exists, and no successor body has volunteered the information the original department said it did not hold.

The question the campaigners put to DSIT was modest. They asked which operators run the country's largest datacentres, what those sites are used for, and how much water and power each one is contracted to draw. DSIT's response, "not hold the requested information", means the government, in formal correspondence, has admitted it cannot answer any of it for the sites that already enjoy the strongest planning privileges in the country.

Those privileges are the second half of the contradiction. In September 2024 ministers designated datacentres as critical national infrastructure, the same status class as energy and water systems, on the grounds that a loss of computing capacity could disrupt essential services. In January 2026 the government opened a route for qualifying sites to opt into the Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project (NSIP) regime, under which developments are approved by central government rather than by local planning committees. Together, the two moves let the largest datacentres leapfrog the planning system that decides what gets built in any given parish.

National Grid figures compiled by the Guardian show 315 datacentres are waiting to connect to the transmission system, on top of the hundreds already awaiting planning permission. The government's own 2024 capacity estimate put operational IT power demand in Great Britain at the highest level of any European country surveyed, and projected a steep rise in the years that followed.

That growth is now bumping into resource limits that ministers have not been able to describe publicly. In July 2026 Water UK, the industry trade body, warned that the UK does not have enough water for the planned datacentre expansion. Separately, the Guardian reported on 25 August that two planned sites will produce higher UK carbon emissions than ExxonMobil's UK operations. Global Action Plan and the law firm Foxglove have launched a legal challenge against the planning consent for a hyperscale datacentre, the largest class of facility, arguing the decision to override local planning processes was taken without adequate environmental scrutiny.

Oliver Hayes, who leads Global Action Plan's work on datacentres and filed the FoI, said: "The government has handed these sites the most powerful planning tools in the country and then admitted, on the record, that it does not know what they are doing with them." Zack Polanski, leader of the Green party in England and Wales, called the reply "a damning indictment of a planning system being run in the dark". Friends of the Earth is calling for a ban on new sites until environmental safeguards are in place, including a 100% additional renewable energy requirement. The Scottish government is reported to be inching toward a moratorium on new datacentres.

A government spokesperson pushed back on a freeze, telling the Guardian that "a pause would be a disaster for jobs and national security". The argument is over whether the public can see who is being fast-tracked, on what terms, and at what cost in water and power.

A public register of designated datacentres is the missing instrument. It would list, for each site, the operator, the end-use category, the contracted grid capacity, the contracted water demand and the planning reference. That is the data DSIT said it did not hold, and what the 315-site grid queue implies someone, somewhere, has.