About 200 people gathered outside a Torridge District Council meeting in Bideford on Monday, 21 September, to protest a massive data centre and battery energy storage facility being planned by infrastructure provider Xlinks on farmland near Torrington.
Organiser Devon Data Centre and BESS Action Group said the turnout showed concern was growing around the plan to create an 850-acre campus to power AI workloads.
Protestors said the planned facility would be an eyesore, with one telling the BBC it would be a “blot on the landscape” and another describing it as “hell on earth” that could affect tourism.
Xlinks has claimed that an early proposal for the site, which includes buildings as tall as Exeter Cathedral looming over Torrington, are now out of date.
It says it plans to build on about one-third of the land, with other spaces left open as nature habitats, and that the facility would create jobs and support the expansion of AI.
Campaigners had called for a moratorium on data centre planning permissions outside of designated AI growth zones, but the government said it has no plans to implement such a pause.
Xlinks, whose plans to bring energy to the UK from Morocco through subsea cables was shelved by the government earlier this year, in June first outlined its plans before a crowd of hundreds of people at a public meeting in the town hall of Great Torrington.
At the time, local residents brought up concerns around noise, light pollution and the fact that the project was proposed for countryside land rather than a brownfield site.
Xlinks said the site was chosen in part due to spare capacity at Alverdiscott substation, which was originally intended to receive power from the company’s Morocco renewable energy scheme.
Earlier this month, hundreds of protestors in Leeds expressed opposition to a 424,000 square foot data centre planned by Microsoft on a former power station near the city.
Local residents near data centres have raised issues around the facilities’ water usage and the impact upon power supplies.