This reopens the employment argument that underpins government support for large-scale build-out just as prime minister Andy Burnham was ruling out a moratorium.
The briefing, titled “The Jobs Mirage of Data Centres” and authored by Verdant co-director James Meadway, argues that techUK’s widely cited jobs figures rest on a methodology built for a generation of smaller facilities that no longer reflects how hyperscale sites are actually staffed.
Where the numbers diverge
techUK has said the data centre sector could create more than 40,000 jobs by 2035, built on a formula of 8.5 jobs per megawatt of capacity, derived from a typical site of 54 staff and 6.35 megawatts. Verdant disputes both the baseline and the extrapolation.
Tracing 20 planned UK sites through planning documents, company filings and press releases, Verdant calculates a weighted average of 1.2 operational jobs per megawatt, and applies a pipeline-wide figure of 1.6 jobs per megawatt to arrive at its headline estimate of roughly 10,400 permanent jobs from the full pipeline by 2035, against techUK’s 40,200.
The gap is similarly stark for existing capacity. Verdant puts current UK data centre employment at around 4,400 direct jobs, compared with techUK’s estimate of 24,300.
The report’s sharpest example sits in the constituency of Labour MP Ian Lavery, who has separately pressed Burnham on the sector. The QTS campus at Cambois, a 720-megawatt site, is expected to create around 400 permanent operational jobs according to a government response to a Freedom of Information request cited in the briefing, a ratio of 0.56 jobs per megawatt. Applying techUK’s formula to the same site would predict more than 6,100 jobs.
Verdant, launched in March 2026 by Meadway and civil society expert Deborah Doane, is linked to the Green Party of England and Wales, whose leader Zack Polanski has separately called for a UK-wide moratorium.
Verdant also set data centres against other large electricity users. On its own figures, existing data centres support 8.6 direct jobs per megawatt of average load, against 291 for steelworks, 400 for car plants, 3,626 for hospitals and 4,534 for schools, colleges and universities, using government energy data and Office for National Statistics employment figures.
Industry and government reject the method
techUK said its estimates follow a published methodology using industry data and standard economic impact techniques, and argued Verdant’s report draws on an “unreliably small sample size” that counts only in-facility roles rather than the wider jobs data centres support in the supply chain.
A government spokesperson also rejected the findings, saying the report relies on a “deeply misleading jobs-per-megawatt metric” and makes false comparisons with hospitals and schools, adding that it discounts the wider economic and national security case for building infrastructure in Britain.
Verdant acknowledges the limits of its own sample. The 20 sites make up around 28% of proposed developments tracked by campaign group Global Action Plan, though the think tank says they account for most of the pipeline’s total capacity, and notes that six of the largest schemes publish no operational headcount at all, meaning its estimate is more likely to overstate job creation than understate it.
A third position in the moratorium argument
The timing puts the report directly alongside the UK’s live moratorium debate. Verdant published on 9 September, the same day Burnham told the Commons “at this point I won’t go as far as a moratorium” in response to Lavery’s request for a pause on new developments, a position Capacity has covered as part of a wider pattern of UK government resistance to a freeze.
Rather than aligning with either side of that argument, Verdant stakes out a third position: it recommends the government pause consent for new large-scale data centres until an assessment framework is in place, make electricity and water availability binding conditions of planning consent, and open a public consultation on the UK’s AI infrastructure plans, echoing water-based constraints Capacity has tracked as a parallel bottleneck to grid capacity.
The jobs question adds to a case techUK has itself made about gaps in current policy. The trade body has previously warned that government AI ambitions do not yet “go far enough” to resolve the barriers holding back large-scale infrastructure delivery, a critique originally aimed at grid and planning constraints that a disputed jobs case now extends to the economic justification for the build-out itself.
A live theme at Capacity Europe
The dispute lands directly on the agenda at Capacity Europe 2026, running 13-15 October in London.
The “Licence to Operate: Earning Community and Government Buy-In” panel on day one addresses planning delays and community opposition across Europe’s data centre pipeline, a tension Capacity has described as having “only sharpened in recent weeks.”
A separate “From Grid Constraint to Competitive Growth” panel and a dedicated Community & Data Centres Forum on day two round out a programme that, taken together, puts the same buy-in question the Verdant report raises in front of the industry’s own decision-makers a month after the report’s publication.
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Capacity Europe 2026
The 25th anniversary edition of Capacity Europe 2025 will bring together 3,500+ decision-makers from the global connectivity and digital infrastructure community.
