Neel Khokhani, founder of investment house Epochal, explains why bringing communities into the conversation earlier could prevent opposition from becoming another barrier to data centre growth.
A data centre developer typically approaches a new site the way an investor approaches a new asset: assess the power, assess the land, assess the connectivity, move once the numbers work. Community engagement, where it happens at all, is usually scheduled for later in that sequence, once the site is largely chosen and the design largely fixed.
By that stage, consultation can feel less like a conversation and more like an announcement, and that sequencing is becoming one of the industry’s biggest planning challenges.
As demand for AI and cloud infrastructure continues to grow, developers are proposing larger facilities in more locations than ever before. At the same time, communities are becoming more informed, more organised and more willing to question how major infrastructure projects will affect the places they live.
In Scotland, a proposed data centre campus in the Lammermuir Hills has already drawn organised opposition, with a petition passing 10,000 signatures in less than a month. In Japan, residents in Inzai have challenged the approval of a 52-metre data centre planned beside residential buildings, saying they were brought into the process too late. In Sydney, residents opposing a proposed new facility have argued against the cumulative impact of several campuses concentrated in the same industrial area – a concern they describe simply as ‘the cluster issue’.
The industry has something valuable to offer local communities, that much is certain – but it cannot assume that value will be self-evident.
Most people understand that the digital economy depends on physical infrastructure, but the question is often whether local communities feel they have been given a genuine opportunity to shape developments before key decisions have already been made.
Three principles, in particular, can make community engagement more meaningful and, in turn, help distinguish developments that progress through planning relatively smoothly from those that face prolonged opposition or appeal.
Start conversations before plans are fixed
Community engagement should begin while there is still genuine scope for feedback to influence a project.
That doesn’t mean asking residents to choose a site or redesign an entire campus. It means identifying which decisions remain open and being honest about them. Landscaping, traffic management, construction schedules, visual screening, cooling technologies and environmental mitigation measures can often be refined long before planning applications are submitted.
Being transparent about what is fixed and what remains open for discussion creates far more productive conversations than presenting a completed proposal and asking for comments that cannot realistically change the outcome.
Continuity also matters. Communities are more likely to trust a developer that builds an ongoing relationship than one represented by a succession of consultants who disappear once planning permission has been secured. A dedicated local liaison can demonstrate that engagement is intended to continue throughout construction and operation, rather than end with planning approval.
Communicate impacts in terms people can understand
Environmental statements and grid connection studies are written for planning officers, not for the people who will live next to the site, and that gap can contribute to avoidable mistrust.
Residents are not interested in decoding environmental assessments or engineering reports. They want clear answers to practical questions. How long will construction last? How much additional traffic should they expect? Will there be noise at night? How much water will the facility use, and what does that mean for local supplies? What measures are in place if conditions change during periods of drought?
The same principle applies once construction begins. Regular updates on progress, expected disruption and performance against environmental commitments help prevent uncertainty from filling information gaps. Communities are generally more understanding of temporary disruption when they know what to expect and can see that commitments are being honoured.
Make the benefits specific, and report on them afterwards
Every planning application highlights investment, employment and economic growth. Those benefits are real, but they can also feel abstract to the people living beside a new development – especially when they have heard the same language attached to developments that delivered less than promised.
Communities are more likely to respond positively when commitments are specific rather than aspirational.
That could include partnerships with local colleges to develop technical skills, apprenticeships linked directly to operational roles, procurement opportunities for regional businesses or investment in infrastructure identified as a local priority. The most effective initiatives reflect the needs of the community rather than applying the same template to every project.
Importantly, those commitments should not disappear once construction is complete.
A developer that publishes a simple annual scorecard against its original commitments can build credibility that pre-planning messaging alone cannot provide, and that credibility can carry into future applications.
There is a straightforward risk-management case underneath this. A contested planning application can add a year or more to a project timeline, and the legal costs of a drawn-out appeal can exceed what early engagement would have cost from the outset. Community relations should not be treated simply as an overhead sitting outside the development budget, but as a consideration that can be managed proactively, at relatively low cost, or reactively, at considerably higher cost, once opposition has already organised.
That cost is compounding as the sector scales. The number of sites that combine grid capacity, suitable land and local tolerance for a project of this size is not growing nearly as fast as demand, which means more developers are approaching the same regions, and often the same communities, in quick succession. A community that had a poor experience with one operator brings that experience to the next planning application, regardless of who is behind it. Reputational effects that used to be contained to a single project are increasingly shared across the sector, which is why operators have good reason to consider community engagement much earlier in the development process.
The industry has spent years refining how it engineers facilities for resilience, efficiency and performance.
The next challenge is to apply that same discipline to community engagement, because permission is won earlier than many developers currently assume, and earned long before a planning committee votes.
