NEWS Data centre hotspots face cooling engineer shortage B
ritain’s accelerating data centre boom is set to intensify demand for air-conditioning engineers as well as plumbers, heating and ventilation installers, with new analysis indicating that the regions attracting the most development have some of the smallest pools of skilled trades needed to build them. Research from Horizon Platforms shows that planning applications for data centres have more than tripled since the 2000s, rising from an average of 14 a year to 44 today, driven in part by the global AI surge. Councils have historically approved 97% of applications, and 63 schemes are currently awaiting a decision.
Of the 119 applications submitted since 2024,
Wales, London and the South East account for 61 – more than half of the national total. Yet ONS Business Register data suggests these same regions have disproportionately fewer plumbing, heating and air-conditioning installation tradespeople (SIC 43220) relative to the scale of development proposed. Horizon Platforms compared 678 data centre
applications lodged since 2000 with employment figures across 16 construction trades involved in building and fitting out data centres. These trades employ just over one million people nationwide, but they are also responsible for delivering hospitals, schools, offices, factories and shops.
The analysis highlights a significant implied gap between where data centres are planned and where the relevant tradespeople live. Wales has received 16 applications since 2024 but has only around 7,000 plumbing and HVAC tradespeople. London has 20 applications and 16,000 tradespeople, while the South East has 25 applications and 36,000 tradespeople. Together, these three regions form the UK’s most active data centre corridor – and its most constrained labour market. Pressure is particularly acute west of London,
where 13 schemes are clustered across Chiltern South Bucks, Slough, Buckinghamshire and Wycombe. If several projects begin construction simultaneously, contractors may need to
redeploy crews from other parts of the country, creating competition for labour and potentially driving bidding wars for the most in-demand trades. Marco Maccio, Digital Director at Horizon Platforms, said: “Much of the talk around the UK’s data centre boom so far has been around planning permission and the water needed to run them, but each and every one of these businesses needs people to physically build and maintain them. There isn’t a separate army of data centre tradespeople waiting around for these projects to begin. They’re the same group of people currently busy fitting out hospitals, schools, offices, factories and shops. “The projects will no doubt still be built, but it will most likely mean contractors moving their crews across the country, which, while not uncommon in the construction trades, is perhaps less expected when you have several major developments all competing for the same people at the same time.
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