A developer could get approval to build a huge new data centre the size of 16 football pitches at the former AkzoNobel site on Wexham Road if councillors agree this week.

Slough Borough Council’s planning committee is set to decide whether to approve the design and layout of the proposed data centre on Wednesday, July 24.

Developers say the size of the data centre – run by Yondr Group – will be ‘well under’ what they could have been allowed to build. But the failure of plans to build new homes on site too means the former paint factory could become entirely filled with data centres.

The council already agreed to the principle of building a data centre on the bank of the Grand Union Canal in 2020. This was to be part of a much larger scheme to redevelop the former AkzoNobel site that also included now-scrapped plans to build 1,000 new homes.

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The ‘outline’ plans said a data centre as large as 71,535 square metres could be built on the northern side of the site by the Grand Union Canal. But developers would have to get approval for the precise design and layout at a later date.

Now new plans claim that the size of the data centre will be much smaller than was originally approved.

The actual size of the data centre will be 67,337.7 square metres – or roughly 16 football pitches. Most of this has already been approved as part of ‘phase 1’ of the development, where more than 42,000 square metres are already under construction.

Now the developers want approval for ‘phase two’ which will provide the final 25,100 square metres.

The largest point of the building will be 15 metres tall, roughly the same size as a four storey building. This is also smaller than the maximum 28.5 metres allowed.

However separate plans in the works could see the entire AkzoNobel site filled up with data centres, where it had once been hoped that homes could be built too.

Slough Borough Council bought the southern half of the site in January 2021, after planning permission for up to 1,000 homes had already been granted in 2020. But the council has since had to sell the site on after it effectively went bankrupt in 2022.

The new owner of the southern part of the site, Equinix, now also hopes to build its own data centre there.

Equinix says plans for this data centre will be submitted to Slough Borough Council ‘later this year'.