‘Slough is like an experiment’: Europe’s largest datacentre hub leaves town sweltering
Photograph: Martin Godwin/The GuardianView image in fullscreenA datacentre in Slough. The government has proposed using the waste heat from datacentres to warm thousands of homes.View image in fullscreenSlough is one of the largest datacentre hubs in the world. Photograph: Martin Godwin/The GuardianAndrea Marinoni, an associate professor at Cambridge and one of the authors of the paper, said the work was still nascent.
- ▪Photograph: Martin Godwin/The GuardianView image in fullscreenA datacentre in Slough.
- ▪The government has proposed using the waste heat from datacentres to warm thousands of homes.View image in fullscreenSlough is one of the largest datacentre hubs in the world.
- ▪Photograph: Martin Godwin/The GuardianAndrea Marinoni, an associate professor at Cambridge and one of the authors of the paper, said the work was still nascent.
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| Original publisher | The Guardian — UK |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jun/26/slough-is-like-an-experiment-europes-largest-datacentre-hub-leaves-town-sweltering |
| Publication time | Fri, 26 Jun 2026 07:00:12 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-06-26T07:07:29.748Z |
| Last seen | 2026-06-26T07:07:29.748Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
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| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | HNJyi7EEzk6G |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
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| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
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| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
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A datacentre in Slough. Photograph: Martin Godwin/The GuardianView image in fullscreenA datacentre in Slough. Photograph: Martin Godwin/The GuardianExtreme heat‘Slough is like an experiment’: Europe’s largest datacentre hub leaves town swelteringEmerging research suggests datacentres create a heat island effect, pushing up temperatures in the immediate vicinity by as much as 9C Aisha DownFri 26 Jun 2026 03.00 EDTLast modified on Fri 26 Jun 2026 03.02 EDTSharePrefer the Guardian on GoogleThe community living next to the largest datacentre park in Europe say the scorching summer heat has grown unbearable.On days like Wednesday, said Nabeel Nawaz, the store manager of a Chaiiwala franchise in the centre of Slough, the heat is like something “pinching your body and burning your skin”.What is…
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