Stop Cardiff Llanrumney data centre
Nick Cooper and Rex Henry, Cardiff East Socialist Party
Cardiff’s Labour council is trying to replace an essential public transport link to University Hospital Wales, with a massive 23-hectare corporate data centre and related campus.
The council has now quietly wrapped-up public consultation, as it enters the final planning stages. The strain on local infrastructure and the rest of south Wales could be immense.
The council pushes its ‘green’ credentials and a narrative of ‘net-zero digital growth’. But the 30,000 square metre campus will consume water equivalent to 1,800 homes.
It risks thermal pollution to the ecologically sensitive River Rhymney, home to bats, otters, and kingfishers. It’s a vital lifeline to acres of woodland that currently protects Cardiff from flooding and pollution, and acts as a carbon-sink.
Names of tech giants missing
Vast tracts of south Wales are being snapped up for massive, power-hungry industrial complexes. But you won’t see the names of the world’s richest tech giants in the planning applications.
Instead, they hide behind generic corporate shells – deploying front organisations, private infrastructure developers, and non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) to do their dirty work.
By the time the community becomes aware, the contracts are signed, and the NDAs are locked in. The ‘shell’ infrastructure is then ready to be handed over to an ‘anchor’ tenant, whose cloud or AI operations run 24/7 behind high security fences and razor wire.
In Cardiff, this corporate game has landed on our doorstep, targeting two key sites. Cardiff East Park and Ride in Llanrumney, and the industrial coastline of Rover Way in Splott.
Data centres are bottomless pits for electricity. The Llanrumney proposal features an on-site substation to feed its immense computing infrastructure.
100,000 homes
These local projects could consume hundreds of megawatts of power – equivalent to adding 100,000 local homes to the grid – threatening to drive up regional energy bills.
Thousands of high-performance servers creates an unimaginable amount of heat. To keep from melting down, they require advanced cooling systems that consume millions of litres of water every day.
This risks depleting local water supplies, just to keep corporate servers cool. Vantage Proxy in Newport consumes over £8 million worth of energy and water a month.
It’s a multi-pronged attack on Cardiff’s working class. The community will lose access to their communal playing fields and nearby green space.
The development site is the ‘park and ride’ used for Wales’s largest hospital. Many will struggle accessing specialist services, already because of the lack of parking and public transport facilities. Many underpaid NHS workers rely on the ‘park and ride’, keeping 1,000 cars a day off the road.
This is asset-stripping. Any profits from this corporate land-grab will not benefit the people of Cardiff.
The community has been ignored, public land liquidated, and an essential transport asset is sacrificed to maximise profit. Cardiff Labour is facilitating this, scrapping a previous legal requirement to retain the ‘park and ride’.
Concrete tomb
Labour councillors claim there will be hundreds of jobs created. But data centres are massive concrete tombs for computers.
While they require workers during construction, completed they operate almost autonomously. A site of tens of acres might only yield a handful of permanent roles.
The system is broken. A planning committee composed primarily of Labour councillors is willing to trample on working people to enrich the capitalist class.
We need a new mass workers’ party, guided by trade unions and grassroots communities affected by these decisions. We need planning decisions back in the hands of the working class, in a sustainably planned, nationalised economy.
