UK digital infrastructure investment hit £11.2bn in 2025

Britain’s businesses put £11.2bn into digital infrastructure last year, roughly three times what the official measure had been reporting.

The jump in UK digital infrastructure investment did not come from a building spree.

Almost none of the difference is new money. The Office for National Statistics changed what counts on Monday.

What the ONS actually did

Its headline measure counts investment in telecommunications structures. On that basis, digital infrastructure investment in 2025 was £3.6bn.

The expanded measure adds data centre buildings, hardware, network software and radio spectrum permits. That produces £11.2bn.

The statisticians are blunt about what they have done. They are not identifying new investment outside existing capital formation data, they write. The expanded definition classifies a greater share of what was already there as infrastructure.

And it fell

Investment fell £0.5bn from 2024, a drop of 4.0%.

It still came third in a series running back to 1997. The direction last year, though, was down, as Tom Krazit noted for The Stack.

The longer trend runs the other way. By 2023 investment had climbed 51% above 2019 levels, while total UK business investment rose 19% across the same years.

Where the money sits

Two asset classes took 84.0% of it in 2025.

The larger is other buildings and structures, at £5.6bn, which is where data centre buildings and fibre and base stations land. That category has grown 83.8% since the start of the 2020 pandemic.

Software and databases took £3.8bn, up almost 95% since 2021, and now a third of the total.

The hardware line reversed

Hardware had been in long-term decline. In 2025 it rose 54.6%, an increase of £0.3bn, reaching £0.7bn.

That is its highest since 2006. The ONS attributes it to data centres expanding to support cloud computing and AI.

Why the old measure missed this

A data centre is not one asset. Its shell sits under buildings, its servers under hardware, its models under software and databases.

The old method looked at structures in the telecoms industry and found none of that. The new one extends beyond telecoms into data processing and hosting.

The ONS considered publishing and broadcasting, then left them out. They make content rather than the infrastructure that moves it.

The state has already reclassified them

The government designated data centres as Critical National Infrastructure in 2024, alongside energy and water supply.

Hyperscale facilities, built and run by global technology firms for their own use, accounted for around 63% of data centre development activity in 2025.

What is driving the demand

AI use among UK businesses with ten or more employees has gone from about 12% in late 2023 to 35% this year, on the ONS survey.

Around 69% of firms were already using cloud systems in 2023, which is what AI deployment runs on.

Oxford Economics found the number of UK data centres rose more than 400% between 2000 and 2024, Tom Rees reported for Bloomberg.

The pipeline is much larger

Barbour ABI counts 171 data centre construction projects that either started in the past year or are expected to start within five.

Industry figures citing that data expect UK data centre investment to reach £10bn a year by 2029. They put the current annual total at £1.75bn.

Public money is a small share, and rising fast

Government grants funded 5.7% of market sector digital infrastructure investment in 2024, worth £0.7bn. In 2023 the figure was £0.2bn.

That is the highest in the series. Across the whole period from 1995 to 2024, grants came to £3.7bn, against £0.5bn the government spent on communications assets it owns itself.

Most of the money is private. The market sector invested £11.6bn in 2024 and funded £11.0bn of that itself.

Telecoms operators account for a large slice. Ofcom put their fixed-network spending at £6.8bn in 2024, with 77% of it going into full fibre access.

The broadband programme slipped

Project Gigabit is a £5bn scheme, and £2bn of it went out between 2020 and 2025.

Nationwide gigabit coverage was meant to arrive in 2030. The 2025 spending review pushed it to 2032.

The constraint is power

AI may have to be rationed, Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey has warned. A shortage of energy capacity will limit how widely any sector can deploy it, he said, in comments Bloomberg reported.

Britain already has the evidence. An Essex data centre waited on a grid connection, and the water industry has warned about supply.

The same squeeze is pushing capital elsewhere. Southeast Asia is planning four times the data centre capacity it currently runs.

Britain keeps announcing anyway. London Tech Week brought a run of AI investment commitments in June.

What the ONS says about its own numbers

The release carries a warning most coverage has left out. The ONS writes that these are not official statistics, and that nobody should use them for policy or decision-making.

They are research into an alternative method, published as official statistics in development. The agency advises caution in using the data.

What it still cannot see

The measure excludes data itself, because no UK estimates exist yet, even though data is what data centres are for.

It does not count cooling systems, power distribution equipment or server racks either. The ONS says it will consider adding them.

There is also a classification hole. The statisticians file a property company that owns a data centre under real estate, so its spending never reaches these figures at all.

What comes next

The ONS plans to fold the expanded definition into its main infrastructure publication, once the OECD reaches an international consensus on measuring these assets.

It is also building an AI account to track AI-related investment across the economy. Britain has meanwhile been funding sovereign AI through the private market.

Until the definition settles, the size of the buildout depends on which measure anyone quotes.