A police raid of a data center in Farnborough, UK, has seen around £1.2 million ($1.61m) worth of equipment seized.

As shared by the City of London Police, the data center was being used to house equipment for illegal streaming services. Two people have also been arrested in connection with the operation, and since released under investigation.

The raid was conducted after the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) received a report of suspicious activity at the data center.

Sky assisted PIPCU with the raid, helping to dismantle the pirate infrastructure, which included clusters of high-bandwidth servers supplying streams to thousands of UK customers.

Detective Sergeant Ben Hobbs, from the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) at the City of London Police, said: “The size of this operation shows how widespread illegal streaming has become in the UK and our commitment to bringing the criminals behind it to justice.

“If you plan to stream, ensure you only use official and not pirated sources to protect yourself from the risks. We will continue to work closely with industry partners like Sky to disrupt these illegal streaming networks and protect consumers.”

The identity of the data center company was not provided. Farnborough, located southwest of London, is home to the Cody Technology Park, which includes data centers operated by Ark Data Centres and Datum Datacentres.

DCD has contacted both Ark Data Centres and Datum. Ark declined to comment. Datum has yet to respond.

In July 2025, PIPCU raided a data center in Cheltenham, the UK, which was said to be illegally streaming Sky channels, and PIPCU raided another data center in the west of England in 2024 as part of another investigation into an illegal streaming service.

Also, last year, Dutch police seized some 250 servers during data center raids in The Hague and Zoetermeer.

While not common, police raids on data centers are generally focused on piracy, cybercrime, or illegal darkweb activities.