> In its note, the [Greater London Authority] said pressure on the grid in west London has been particularly acute because a number of data centres have been built nearby in recent years, taking advantage of fibre optic cables that run along the M4 corridor, before crossing the Atlantic.
The article (https://archive.ph/Azysn BTW) says Hillingdon, Ealing and Hounslow. Zooming in on a random patch of land between the labels Ealing and Hillingdon, I found a large clump of what seems to be warehouses.
Maybe elsewhere is cheaper, but an area with warehouses is cheap enough, in a sense.
I found Heathrow too, so I assume noise depresses the pricing. But servers don't mind aircraft noise.
Oops. I had only residential property in mind, perhaps because the title is "home ban", but my phrasing covered both kinds of property. Sloppy of me. Sorry.
FWIW, a decade ago it was revealed that Heathrow's holding company was happily buying up houses close to the airport.[0]
(Full disclosure: also years ago I did some consulting work for the airport. There are some very strange incentives at play at LHR which may not be apparent to outsiders.)
They're in Slough which isn't technically London but still close enough to affect the west London's electric grid.
The problem with moving too far out is that you end up with even greater problems of having your data centre miles from any major fibre backbone. It's a similar reason why a lot of broadcasting studios and other network hubs used to be based close to the BT tower despite that being hugely expensive real estate.
For ‘financial stuff’ where proximity matters (which is a small fraction of it) you would be colocated with the exchange, and there’s no need for that data centre to be in London.
As I understand Slough and West London more broadly are a sweet spot for both connectivity to international fibre cables as they come out of the ground and available electricity at a reasonable rate (although they might have saturated that particular aspect if the article is true). Slough trading estate has a dedicated Biomass Power Station.
With less confidence, I vaguely remember a discussion with a datacentre technician at one of these sites who said something about the curvature of the cabling which can impact latency/speed for high frequency trading outfits located in the datacentres. I'm not sure in which direction this would worsen but perhaps another factor.
