Buckinghamshire Council approves AWS data center campus at Iver with conditions attached

Buckinghamshire Council has granted Amazon Web Services planning permission for a data center campus at Iver, on a Ridgeway Distribution Centre plot that still holds 17 industrial and warehouse units. The application went in under the Amazon Data Services name, reaching planners in October 2025, three years after the company bought the site off-market for £132.5 million ($165.6 million).

The approved scheme covers 30,525 square meters (328,560 square feet), demolishing every structure on the plot to replace them with a single two-story data center building, an MV building, a substation compound containing two switchrooms and associated electrical infrastructure, and a generator yard holding 27 backup generators. The filing states those generators would mostly run on hydrotreated vegetable oil, leaving the balance of the fleet's fuel unspecified.

The three years between the 2022 purchase and the 2025 application suggests the plot was held ahead of a design and consent process rather than bought against a fixed build schedule, though the coverage does not explain the delay and does not say what the land was doing in the interim. The consent arrived with a bill attached: planning officers accepted that the project carried some risk of harming the surrounding landscape, then concluded that the need for data centers and the employment the campus might bring outweighed it. Amazon will pay £600,382 toward projects offsetting air pollution from the development and £73,000 to improve public rights of way near the site, and it has agreed to monitor emissions from its generators. Three items remain outstanding: the council wants further information on construction traffic, drainage and water use.

Cooling here is built around the weather: for most of the year the campus would run direct evaporative cooling fed by outside air, while hotter days would switch to adiabatic cooling supplied primarily by rainwater, with mains water as a backup. Read against the unresolved water submission, the design says where the load will fall: the heaviest cooling duty sits on harvested rain, and the accounting for it is one of three pieces the council has yet to receive.

Iver sits a few miles east of Slough, the largest data center hub in the greater London area and the address of many large-scale developments, while AWS's existing UK cloud region sits in the Bristol area, though the company names it "London." That region launched in 2016 and gained a new availability zone in August 2026, and the planning documents do not say how the Iver campus would relate to it, what capacity the campus would carry, or who its tenants would be.

Amazon is also linked to developments in Houghton Regis in Bedfordshire, Hayes in Middlesex, Didcot in Oxfordshire, Swindon in Wiltshire and Bracknell in Berkshire, a ring of sites around the western and northern edges of the London market rather than inside its established core. Replacing 17 warehouses with one building is the physical shape of that trade: a low-density industrial plot becomes a dense compute site, and the value migrates from the sheds to the connection and the consent. The £132.5 million land price works out to roughly £403 for each of the 328,560 square feet the campus would contain, which is not a figure that describes a distribution centre.

Amazon's UK power buying has run ahead of its buildings: in September the company signed a 36MW Shetland wind PPA with Statkraft for 2030 delivery, part of a UK programme the company counts at more than 50 agreements, with no price or contract length disclosed. The Iver file carries no equivalent certainty: no megawatt figure, no construction timetable, no grid-connection detail, and nothing in the filing to say whether supply has been arranged.

Iver is evidence for the first half of an argument this page has made before: consent, not capital, now decides the data center build-out, with permitting regimes, water and local opposition acting as the real constraints on hyperscale expansion. The land was bought four years before it cleared planning, and the price of clearing it was a six-figure pollution payment, a rights-of-way contribution and three loose ends on traffic, drainage and water. Those three items will shape how the campus sits on the roads and the water table around it, and none of them answers the question a contractor would ask first: when the site can be built and what will power it.