Campaigners are opposing a hyperscale data center campus planned for Bedfordshire, UK, over concerns about its impact on the water supply.

Plans for the two-building campus at Linmere Island, near Houghton Regis, northwest of Luton, were submitted earlier this year. It is likely to host servers for Amazon’s AWS cloud platform, with Amazon Data Services named in several council documents.

However, advocacy group Foxglove says the plan should be rejected, and called for an urgent review of the UK’s strategy on new data centers.

Foxglove said the UK government has “two major questions to answer about allowing new gigantic data centers to be built,” relating to how it will ensure there is adequate power and water available for people living near new builds, and how it will mitigate the additional emissions caused by data centers.

“Until these questions have been answered, both for the proposed Houghton Regis data center in Bedfordshire and in general for all new projects across the country, planning permission should be refused,” Foxglove said.

The group added: “What is not up for debate is the tremendous resource cost, in drinking water, power, and carbon emissions, of the hyperscale data centers proposed in the current UK building spree.

“That’s why we’re pushing back and asking the government to show they have a plan for building new hyperscale data centers without trashing our critical supplies of drinking water, power, or shredding our chances of cleaning up our air.”

It has sent a letter to Central Bedfordshire Council opposing the plan.

If approved, the Houghton Regis campus will comprise two data center buildings of 20 meters (65 ft) in height, along with backup generators and other supporting infrastructure. The IT capacity of the facility has not been disclosed. Around 140 solar panels will be installed at the site.

The applicant is Colliers Properties LLC, a known partner of Amazon, and the application says the site will host cloud computing infrastructure. Arup is the project’s engineering firm.

Aside from the naming of Amazon Data Services on some submitted council documents, other details point to the cloud giant.

Colliers’ page notes that the operator in question has invested more than $3.8 billion USD (£3 billion GBP) in its UK region from 2020 to 2023. Amazon last year noted it AWS invested more £3 billion in the UK between 2020 and 2023. Both companies list the same contributed value to the UK’s GDP in that time. AWS has committed to spending £8 billion ($10.47bn) on data centers in the UK by 2030.

In the application, Colliers Properties states emissions from the facility will be fully offset by the purchase of renewable energy to be supplied to the grid. Amazon claims to be the largest corporate buyer of renewable energy credits in the world. Both Amazon and the unnamed operator of this new site are set to become carbon neutral by 2040.

DCD has contacted AWS for comment.