Booming demand for artificial intelligence is encouraging Big Tech companies and their suppliers to explore converting old power stations and industrial sites into data centres.

Microsoft, Google and Amazon are pouring billions of dollars into building data centres to power cloud computing and AI services, but it has become increasingly challenging to find suitable locations with sufficient power for the energy-hungry facilities.

Many data centre markets are “heavily constrained when it comes to land availability and power”, which in turn fuelled interest in smaller markets and “more complicated sites” such as old power stations, said Adam Cookson, head of land transactions for real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield’s EMEA data centre advisory group.