UK Data Centres 2025: risk, regulation, and real-world resilience

• by Anthony Orjally
• Advent IM Blog

The UK’s data centre estate is growing fast, but geography and power are biting. West London/Slough—the low-latency darling of finance—is edging toward saturation on both land and grid headroom, while demand surges from cloud, multi-cloud and AI workloads.

The regulatory weather

The government’s forthcoming Cyber Security & Resilience Bill is the big mover. It modernises the UK’s NIS Regulations (2018), broadening scope to capture managed service providers and—critically for this audience—government has stated it is considering bringing data centres at or above ~1MW explicitly into scope as operators of essential services (OES). Expect tougher duties, sharper oversight, and a higher assurance bar for suppliers.

Don’t neglect physical security’s national authorities. NPSA remains the UK’s technical authority for physical/personnel protective security, with specific data-centre guidance and the CAPSS programme for cyber assurance of physical security systems (PSIM/CCTV/ACS). Treat your cameras, access control and BMS as OT—hardened and assured, not “install-and-forget”.

Threat landscape: outages, ransomware and supply chain

The lesson from recent years is convergence. Data centres are targets in their own right, but many incidents cascade via suppliers: MOVEit (MFT) exploitation across thousands of organisations; Snowflake-linked compromises affecting Ticketmaster and Santander; and identity-layer incidents (Okta) that ripple across customers. These aren’t “their” problems—they’re tests of your third-party governance, access hygiene and contractual controls.

Meanwhile, UK telco incidents (e.g., Colt ransomware) show how disruption to carriers and interconnects can knock on to data-centre customers. Design for graceful degradation and high-friction change control when upstream providers are on fire.

AI: more power, more heat, more governance

Trump’s state visit has produced a US–UK “Tech Prosperity Deal” with big-ticket AI and cloud investments: Nvidia’s plan to deploy ~120k GPUs across the UK; Microsoft’s multibillion-pound UK AI build-out; and additional cloud/DC commitments. Capacity will tighten; scrutiny will increase. Pair expansion with ISO/IEC 42001-style AI management, DPIAs for AI operations data, and security-by-design for model pipelines.

The GRC takeaways

• Treat DCs as CNI in all but name—anticipate NIS expansion and operate as if you’re in scope now.
• Run converged assurance: physical reviews, CAPSS-aware hardening, red teaming that exercises people, process and plant.
• Make third-party risk evidence-rich: contract for patch SLAs, MFA/IdP levels, logging retention, and breach notice windows; audit them.
• Stand up AI governance (policy, model inventory, risk register, assurance cadence) now; audits later will ask for it.

Written by Ellie Hurst, Commercial Director