At DCD Connect London, Ark's Director of Public Affairs Allan Bosley sat down with DCD to talk about why data centres have suddenly become a public conversation, and why the UK sector needs to explain what it does, what it uses and what it delivers.
For most of their history, UK data centres have worked out of sight. They have carried banking, retail, public services and the connected economy for decades, mostly for people who never knew they were using one.
That has changed. At DCD Connect London, Allan Bosley, Ark's Director of Public Affairs, spoke to DCD's James Raddings about why the sector is now in the spotlight, and what it needs to do about it.
Allan has worked with Ark for 17 years, from the days of relatively small enterprise deployments to the scale the sector operates at today. He describes the change as a tide that has been rising for a long time. Cloud brought the first wave of large-scale facilities. AI has brought the noise.
What is new is not the demand. It is the attention.
Allan's description of what a data centre operator does is deliberately plain: keep the power on, keep the equipment cool, and keep the wrong people out. Doing that well is complex and takes resources, but the job itself is easy to explain.
It is also worth being clear about who uses the power. Operators provide the environment. It is customers' equipment, running customers' services, that draws most of the energy.
And in the UK, that energy is used efficiently. The latest government figures put data centres at around 2% of GB electricity demand in 2024 (DESNZ, June 2026). On water, more than half of UK sites surveyed use waterless cooling (techUK and the Environment Agency, 2025). The UK model is different from the one behind many of the headlines from overseas, and the sector has rarely made that case clearly.
The point Allan returns to most is the one he calls the most misunderstood. Data centres do not create demand. They respond to it.
Satnav, everyday apps, always-on connectivity and the cloud itself all grew because people and businesses wanted them, and the infrastructure grew to serve them. As Ark puts it, every cloud has a data centre lining.
AI follows the same pattern. The UK will build the AI capacity its own customers need, which is not the same as the American market and should not be judged by it. That perspective matters, Allan argues, because it keeps the debate away from alarmist claims about water and power that do not reflect the UK picture.
Digital infrastructure underpins a significant part of the economy and the public services people rely on. AI is now bringing together that infrastructure and a genuinely new set of applications, at a moment when public understanding has not caught up.
Closing that gap is a job for the whole sector: explaining what data centres do, what they use, and what they make possible. Ark intends to keep doing its part.
Watch the full interview on DCD: DCD Studio: The UK data center shift with Allan Bosley, Ark Data Centres. With thanks to DCD and InfraXmedia.
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