I am in the beating heart of Silicon Fen. The streets here are named things like Charles Babbage Road, Ada Lovelace Road and JJ Thompson Avenue. The pavements are eerily clean, the buildings are state-of-the-art and there is no one to be seen. It is a Sunday morning and I am on my way to the West Cambridge Data Centre (WCDC).

WCDC is the University’s central facility for data strategy. It stores data relating to the University Information Services (UIS), research activity, Cambridge Assessment and Cambridge University Press. It also holds Dawn, the world’s fastest AI supercomputer. It consists of four data halls spread across 2,200 square metres and it cost 150 million pounds to build.

Student awareness of WCDC is low. Most of my friends had never heard of it. One assumed that UIS “was all in cabinets in the Student Services Centre or a cloud based in North Virginia.”

To be fair to my friends, their ignorance is somewhat engineered. WCDC is a black windowless building tucked away down a private road in the middle of a field. It has no website. It has 24/7 on-site security and is surrounded by a 2.9 metre-high galvanised palisade anti-jack fence. Access is by key card only.

“WCDC is a black windowless building tucked away down a private road in the middle of a field”

Ritchie Carter, responsible for passive infrastructure and hosting at WCDC, told me that they “tried not to encourage visitors” and that you had to be on a “list of approved access” to visit. He described working at WCDC as “like an episode of Red Dwarf.” The inside was composed of long, sterile, empty corridors and white light. Ritchie admitted it was “not the most gregarious place,” a bit like a “spaceship” where “you don’t see anyone.” Ritchie also told me that WCDC turned ten in March, so perhaps my article could feature as a kind of “birthday party” for the centre. I suggested that given WCDC’s anonymity, the article should be more of an introduction.

In his 1995 book Being Digital, Nicholas Negroponte described digitisation as a shift from “atoms to bits.” Yet, what interests me is how material the bits of digitisation really are. There is a glaring contradiction between the imagined immateriality of data and its tangibility, even within Cambridge. WCDC is a real building. It employs six men. It constantly vibrates and hums at over one hundred decibels. And, crucially, it demands a lot of energy.

“The International Energy Agency estimates that data centres consume 1% of global electricity and demand could double by 2026”

Although WCDC describes itself as “sustainable” due to its efficient “chilled water cooling system,” Ritchie acknowledged that they were still “burning ice caps,” albeit at a slower rate than most gas-guzzling data centres. The environmental impact of Big Data is a hot topic at the moment. The International Energy Agency estimates that data centres consume 1% of global electricity and demand could double by 2026. Last month, The Financial Times reported that pollution from data centres had cost US public health 5.4 billion dollars since 2019.

The situation is more acute in Cambridge than in most places. As the city morphs into a tech-fuelled “growth corridor,” the demand for data storage far outstrips its resources. Ritchie said that WCDC is “almost at capacity,” hamstrung by a severe lack of water. Last year, a report by Water East England estimated that Cambridge was to have a water deficit of up to 65 megalitres per day by 2050. The recent announcement of a new reservoir to mitigate the issue has sparked fears of further environmental degradation and the effect on local housing. Hannah Holmes, Research Associate in the Department for Land Economy, told me that digital and social inequality sat “side by side” in Cambridge and there was a need for more research into how the two exacerbated each other.

Why does any of this matter to students? At face value, it doesn’t really. For now, WCDC remains clouded in obscurity. The frontiers of Silicon Fen orbit around Cambridge’s two train stations, far from most colleges. Water shortages have not hit students (although they have hit affordable housing schemes). Digitisation remains peacefully immaterial in the minds of most.

Yet I am drawn to WCDC because it symbolises something unprecedented. The iron cage of bureaucracy and paperwork has always been obscure, mystified and the domain of the expert. Yet it has never had the power to alter the ecology of the local environment and raise the temperature of the globe. Both local data centres like WCDC and new international ones in the UK are responsible for quickening the pace of environmental collapse. Their insatiable thirst also places them in competition with the thirst of the local community. In Cambridge, it is likely digitisation will exacerbate existing inequalities.

On WCDC’s tenth birthday we should celebrate its intelligence and innovation. Cambridge is the most intensive technological cluster in the world. Yet as students, we also need to think about the environmental and social impacts of digitisation, as immaterial as they might seem. As WCDC enters its adolescence, it shows no signs of slowing down. It may live in the driest place in the country, but it is thirstier than ever.