Fernando
07 May 2026
The UK is building data centres at a pace that has no precedent. Over $59 billion in investment has been announced since 2023. Fifty new facilities are expected to come online within the next five years. The government’s AI Growth Zones are accelerating everything further – Culham is confirmed, Teesside is widely reported as the second, and more are coming in Wales, Scotland, and Manchester.
For the contractors delivering these projects, the pressure is intense: compressed programmes, aggressive handover dates, and clients who need capacity operational yesterday. When Microsoft, Google, or Meta commission a hyperscale campus, the construction partner who can shave weeks off the programme has a significant advantage.
But there’s a second pressure building alongside speed – one that’s harder to see but increasingly impossible to ignore.
The carbon problem nobody’s talking about
The data centre sustainability conversation has, rightly, focused on operational energy. PUE ratios, renewable power procurement, cooling efficiency – these are the metrics that dominate boardroom dashboards and investor presentations.
What’s received far less attention is the carbon embedded in the buildings themselves.
Microsoft’s 2023 sustainability report acknowledged that its Scope 3 emissions had risen by nearly 31%, driven primarily by data centre construction and the embodied carbon in concrete and steel. Meta has reported that 63% of its total carbon footprint comes from capital goods, including construction materials. The iMasons Climate Accord – backed by AWS, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and over 40 other firms – has identified the lack of an agreed metric for embodied carbon across data centre lifecycles as a major gap that needs closing.
These aren’t fringe concerns. Embodied carbon from construction is now being described as a board-level KPI for major operators. Microsoft is piloting cross-laminated timber data centres and low-carbon concrete alternatives. The direction of travel is clear: the hyperscalers who commission these buildings are going to start asking their construction partners to account for, and reduce, the carbon in every beam, slab, and foundation.
For contractors, this is both a challenge and an opportunity. Those who can demonstrate low-carbon supply chain solutions in their bids will have an edge. Those who can’t will increasingly find themselves on the wrong side of procurement frameworks that reward measurable sustainability performance.
Why foundations and below-ground infrastructure matter more than you might think
Foundations and below-ground concrete elements are some of the most material-intensive parts of any data centre build. A single facility can require hundreds of individual concrete components – structural foundations for columns and equipment bases, plinths for generators and cooling plant, transformer bases, and the foundations supporting external infrastructure across the campus.
Then there are drawpits. Data centres depend on vast cabling and utility networks running beneath and between buildings, and each connection, junction, and access point requires a concrete drawpit. On a large campus, these can number in the thousands. Each one is traditionally formed on site using formwork, reinforcement, and in-situ concrete – a repetitive, labour-intensive process that consumes significant programme time and material.
Multiply that across a campus with multiple buildings, and the concrete volumes are substantial. So is the programme time consumed by repetitive, sequential foundation works that cannot easily be accelerated using conventional methods.
This is where the opportunity lies. Foundations are a high-volume, high-repetition element – exactly the kind of work where offsite manufacturing and automation deliver the greatest gains.
A different approach
At Hyperion, we design and manufacture concrete infrastructure using computational optimisation and robotic production. The geometry of each foundation is digitally engineered to place material only where structural performance demands it, eliminating the excess that traditional methods build in by default.
The result is concrete elements that use up to 70% less concrete, reduce embodied carbon by approximately 65%, and require around 50% less on-site labour to install. They are manufactured offsite in our Forge I facility near Scunthorpe, delivered to site ready to install, and placed without formwork.
For drawpits specifically, offsite manufacturing transforms what is typically one of the most tedious and time-consuming elements of a datacentre build into a rapid, repeatable installation process. Rather than forming each drawpit individually on site – with all the associated formwork, curing, and sequencing constraints – premanufactured units arrive ready to place, dramatically reducing the programme time for below-ground works and freeing up site labour for other activities.
This is not theoretical. We have validated these numbers through live UK projects.
At Welsh Water’s Usk Reservoir, working with Mott MacDonald Bentley, we delivered 66 pipe support foundations that cut concrete demand by 560 tonnes, saved an estimated 70 tonnes of CO₂, and accelerated the construction programme by eight weeks – installing three times faster than traditional methods would have allowed. At a constrained reservoir site where access, lifting, and programme were all tight, the lighter, prefabricated units simplified every aspect of the installation.
For National Grid, our 3D-printed substation foundations achieved eight times the required safety factor in independent testing at the University of Sheffield, with 70% less concrete and 65% less embodied carbon. Forty minutes to produce each foundation. Performance that exceeded expectations across every test.
What this means for datacentre contractors
Data centre foundations and drawpits share many characteristics with the work we’ve already delivered: they’re standardised, repeated across a site, structurally relatively straightforward, and programme-critical. The approvals pathway is less complex than nuclear or transmission, which means the technology can be adopted faster and with fewer regulatory hurdles.
For a contractor bidding on a hyperscale campus, the proposition is concrete: fewer truck movements to site, less on-site labour, shorter foundation programmes, and measurable carbon reductions that can be reported directly to clients whose sustainability teams are watching Scope 3 numbers with increasing scrutiny.
And for data centre operators who are setting embodied carbon targets alongside their operational ones, a supply chain partner that can demonstrate a 65% reduction in foundation carbon – backed by independent test data – is a genuinely differentiating asset in a competitive market.
The Teesside convergence
There is an additional dimension worth noting for contractors operating in the North East. Teesside is on the verge of becoming one of the UK’s most significant data centre construction hubs, with the Teesworks site widely reported as the government’s second AI Growth Zone – potentially hosting Europe’s largest data centre campus, with the government estimating the programme could unlock up to £100billion in investment.
Hyperion is already delivering on Teesside. We are manufacturing 95 concrete sleepers for Costain’s work on the Northern Endurance Partnership CO₂ pipeline, produced at Forge I – less than 90 minutes from the Teesworks site. We are an established, operational presence in the region, with a factory, a live project, and a supply chain that is ready to scale.
For contractors who are positioning themselves for the coming wave of Teesside data centre construction, the opportunity to work with a local, proven supplier of low-carbon concrete infrastructure – one that can deliver lower carbon, faster programmes, and offsite manufacturing at scale – is worth exploring.
What next
If you are working on a data centre project, or planning to bid on one, and you want to understand how our foundation system could reduce your programme time and embodied carbon, we would welcome the conversation.
To find out more about working with Hyperion Robotics, click here.
