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Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC World Service. I'm Gideon Long.

Data centres are increasingly becoming part of our daily lives and our landscapes.

Great big warehouses packed with computers that power pretty much every digital thing we do

from surfing the internet, using AI chatbots, or filing our tax returns.

They've popped up around the world in recent years, and whether we like it or not, more are coming.

We are going to over-triple our demand for data centers.

And so the industry is building out in the United States,

but also globally to meet that demand, all indications are that we are still behind.

The trouble is people don't necessarily want to live next to these places, that big warehouses

often built close to the towns and cities they serve, and there's a perception at least,

that they're pushing up electricity costs and consuming precious water.

People's energy bills around the country are skyrocketing in order to pay for these AI data centers for them.

Building it on agricultural land is not the answer. You can't eat data.

So as the artificial intelligence revolution rolls on, fueling the need

for ever greater digital storage capacity, how do we learn to live with data centers? That's what

we're asking here on BBC Business Daily. I'm on the edge of a field just north of London.

It's a lovely spring day and the field is full of yellow flowers from the rapeseed crop that's planted here.

And there are hedgerows and trees nearby.

And I'm here because there's a plan to build a big data centre here, one of the biggest in Europe.

And some of the local residents from the nearby commuter town of Potters Bar are not happy about it.

And with two of them, Ros Naylor and Adet Garvey, Ros, what have you got against this plan?

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