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Businesses migrating from a single, public cloud provider has been the direction of travel of UK digital infrastructure for years. As far back as 2020, Barclays found that 43% of enterprise CIOs were already planning to bring workloads back from the public cloud to on-premises or private cloud infrastructure. Since then, IDC, Gartner and a host of vendor surveys have tracked an increase in this intention.

Tech headlines are being dominated by the perfect storm that has led to a global shortage of Random Access Memory (RAM). As the short-term, temporary memory that handles data for processing and applications, RAM - and specifically Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) - is a foundational business technology.

London still hosts the biggest concentration of UK data centre capacity, but the centre of gravity is starting to move. AI workloads are changing the infrastructure maths, pushing power, space and planning considerations up the decision list. That is exactly where regional locations start to look like the sensible option. Government data shows how concentrated the market remains: as of autumn 2024, London is estimated at 1,048MW of colocation IT load. Compare that with 44MW in the East of England, 17MW in the North East and 30MW in Scotland. The gap is huge, yet it is not a permanent advantage.

In recent days, the headlines of most technology titles have been dominated by the perfect storm that has led to a global shortage of Random Access Memory (RAM). As the short-term, temporary memory that handles data for processing and applications, RAM - and specifically Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) - is a foundational business technology.

Cloud residency has moved from a technical preference to a board-level control question, as organisations are being asked to evidence who can access data, under which jurisdictions, and what happens when something goes wrong across borders. A Gartner survey of CIOs and IT leaders in Western Europe found that 61% expect geopolitical factors to increase their reliance on local or regional cloud providers, while also predicting that by 2030, more than 75% of enterprises outside the US will have a digital sovereignty strategy.