DECARBONISATION
solves two distinct NHS problems with a single piece of infrastructure.
The energy feeding a data centre is decarbonising over time.
The other half of the picture: compute Everything above stands up as an energy proposition in its own right. But it is only half the story. The NHS has a significant and growing requirement for resilient IT infrastructure on site: most Trusts are required, under current standards, to maintain resilient data centre capability. Hosting a third-party data centre operator on site brings a real advantage here. Commercial operators build and maintain the physical facility; other providers then fit it out with hardware and deliver managed services from within it. The NHS could bring its own hardware into that facility, or work with a third-party provider, gaining resilient infrastructure with a direct, dark-fibre connection into the hospital itself. This also opens up scalable options for processing
AI workloads, including medical imaging, directly on site, rather than relying solely on the public internet and remote cloud capacity. There is a substantial business case still to be properly worked through here, but the direction of travel is clear: co-locating heat and compute
Industry voices Astrid Wynne, head of data and AI at Techbuyer and Advisory Council Board Member of the Data Centre Alliance’s Sustainability Special Interest Group, has been exploring this territory from the data centre side for several years, and sees the same two-in-one case for hospitals specifically. “The technology and the appetite both exist,” she says. “What has been missing is a genuinely credible bridge between the data centre sector and a public sector partner who understands both the opportunity and the constraints. Healthcare is one of the few environments where a single facility can genuinely deliver two things a site needs at once, decarbonised heat and resilient compute, rather than just being another customer for a heat network. That combination is what makes this a genuinely different proposition to the district heating schemes the sector has seen before, and it’s largely untapped.”
Where this goes next Technologies and market interest both exist. What is needed now is a small number of Trusts willing to explore this properly: to test the commercial model, the regulatory position, and the practical engineering questions on real sites, rather than in the abstract. This is not a finished blueprint. It is an emerging opportunity that deserves serious, collaborative exploration between NHS estates and digital teams, data centre operators, and the wider industry bodies who understand both worlds. If this resonates with your own Trust’s circumstances, particularly if you have spare capacity on your electrical infrastructure, land that could support a co-located facility, or a genuine appetite to explore this as part of your own Net Zero strategy, I would be glad to hear from you:
steven.heape@ancorix.co.uk. The prize, if we get this right, is real: a genuine, investable route to decarbonising NHS heat that does not depend on public capital that no longer exists, built on the back of an infrastructure boom that is happening anyway, whether or not healthcare chooses to benefit from it.
Steven Heape
Steven Heape chairs IHEEM’s Environmental and Sustainability Advisory Panel, and is a Board Trustee of the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management (CIWEM) and a member of the UKWA Net Zero Advisory Board. He has spent over 15 years structuring low-carbon infrastructure across the public sector, working with around 110 NHS Trusts, including Eastbourne District General Hospital, the UK’s first 100 per cent renewably heated hospital. He is currently developing new delivery models for NHS heat decarbonisation, including co-locating data centres on hospital estates.
November 2026 Health Estate Journal 33
AdobeStock / Sashkin
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