AWS Houghton Regis (Linmere) data center, Houghton Regis, England

Two data centre buildings are planned for the Linmere Island site at Houghton Regis in Central Bedfordshire, an 8.7 hectare plot boxed in by the A5 Dunstable bypass, Chantry Way, Woodside Link and Sundon Road. The campaign group Foxglove identifies Amazon Web Services as the operator behind the applicant, Colliers Properties LLC.

The officer report describes about 51,300 square metres of floorspace in two buildings with a substation compound between them, an attenuation pond and an entrance from Chantry Way. The buildings would be about 20 metres tall, with lift shafts and plant reaching 25 metres, and the developer's consultation put the operating workforce at 70 to 100 people. The report counted at least 350 construction jobs over three to five years and 70 permanent jobs, and said the scheme was part of the applicant's plans to invest 8 billion pounds in the UK data centre market. The land lies in Linmere, the Houghton Regis North urban extension whose 2014 outline permission allowed up to 5,150 homes and a data centre; in January 2025 the council removed the data centre and the island site from that permission.

Chalton Parish Council objected that the scheme broke with the employment zone agreed for Linmere, that 70 highly technical jobs offered little to local people, and that the applicant had not said how much power its 43 emergency generators would produce. The parish estimated the campus would draw between 50 and 100 megawatts from the Sundon substation over a 132 kV connection. Anglian Water objected to a connection into its foul sewer over capacity and pollution risk; the connection turned out to be into Thames Water's network, and officers proposed settling it by condition. At the development management committee in early July 2025, Keith Featherstone of Chalton Parish Council said: "This site has been selected only because it's close to the Sundon substation." He estimated that 40 to 50 per cent of the energy supplied would leave as waste heat from 222 extraction fans and put carbon dioxide emissions at more than 12,000 tonnes a year. Tim Squirrell, head of strategy at Foxglove, said similar data centres "tend to consume between four and 19m litres of water a day" for cooling, and that it was unclear how much Affinity Water would need to supply. Houghton Regis Town Council backed the parish objections. Nick Finney, the planning agent, said the buildings would be air cooled and that "Affinity confirmed it can supply sufficient water."

The committee approved the plan subject to conditions, including one on a district heating network, and a Section 106 agreement. No decision notice had been issued when, in March 2026, a solicitor for a third-party objector wrote to the council arguing that the climate and renewable energy measures it had relied on were not secured by condition and that the draft Section 106 agreement had not been published. The letter indicated that a judicial review might follow, and on legal advice the council sent the application back to committee. On May 6, 2026 the committee approved it again, with condition 24 reworded and the draft Section 106 agreement published. Featherstone told the meeting that the sustainability statement was the original one and covered the two buildings but not the equipment inside that makes the heat: "It's madness to invest in an increased grid capacity and then allow most of the energy to add to global warming." Finney said the site would use no water to cool servers for about 97 per cent of the year, and that heat export depended on "the availability of a potential heat network and a specific customer."

The permission is not final until the Section 106 agreement is completed and Central Bedfordshire Council issues its decision notice; in May the council's principal planning officer told the committee that "the Section 106 agreement is being finalised and no decision notice has been issued to date."