nLighten CEO Dawn Childs on edge datacentres and sovereignty

You recently gave evidence to the Environmental Audit Committee on the UK’s AI growth zone policy. What do you think is the realistic pipeline for datacentre capacity, given the government’s expectations?

The government’s expectation of multiple gigawatts is nonsense. With UK power costing roughly four times more than in the Nordics or the US, running a 100MW facility here would cost a quarter of a billion pounds more a year in power. Of the 119 applications currently in planning or under construction, we will realistically see only about two gigawatts reach the market by the middle of the next decade, not 50GW. The growth we get here will be purely organic or sovereign.

How does the retail colocation business model differ from hyperscale development under these constraints?

In retail colocation, we have to “build and they will come” to support the local ecosystem. You cannot wait for customers to line up. In contrast, the hyperscale market is different. These are billion-pound facilities; operators will not break ground on a 100MW site in the hope of leasing it – they wait until they have secured an anchor customer for a build-to-suit project.

What is driving enterprises back to edge datacentres, and how does data sovereignty fit into this shift?

A decade ago, there was a massive migration off-premises to larger datacentres and then to the cloud. Now we are seeing a movement back to the edge. Enterprises are concerned about the US Cloud Act and want to keep their data physically within their local jurisdiction. As a European-headquartered company, we provide that close-coupled, connected, sovereign local compute that global players cannot match.

“Of the 119 [UK datacentre] applications currently in planning or under construction, we will realistically see only about two gigawatts reach the market by the middle of the next decade, not 50GW”

Dawn Childs, nLighten

If there is US software in your servers, or global equipment dependencies, doesn’t a backdoor risk remain regardless of where the facility is headquartered?

The concept of sovereign AI is ill-defined. You can never fully get away from the global supply chain. It is up to companies to define their sovereign requirements and do their own diligence. However, partnering with a company headquartered in Europe means workloads are not constantly shifted globally for efficiency, and that gives you a greater sense of control.

You have upgraded the Bristol site to 1.2MW, but what happens when hardware demands 1MW per rack? Can legacy structures like this cope?

Some legacy facilities absolutely cannot be upgraded for those densities due to rigid ceiling heights or cooling routing constraints. However, we have fitted Bristol to scale up rack density using direct-to-chip liquid cooling. For the massive high-density compute demands of the future, we have modular, special-purpose facilities coming online designed to keep pace with emerging hardware.