A HUGE new 'data centre' could be built at the site of a former hospital near Swindon.

The planning application has been lodged by Mullhaven Properties to demolish old buildings used to house internet servers and build the new data centre in its place on the site of the old Burderop Hospital, near Wroughton.

The bid says: “The site was formerly occupied by a military hospital, telephone exchange and office building.

"These buildings were demolished in the 1980s and early 1990s and replaced by the existing data centre buildings.

"The existing data centre campus was in use up until July 2020 when the previous owner closed its operations at the site.

“Owing to the existing data centres age and the technology available when these buildings were implemented, the current data centres are no longer fit for their intended use. Their dated designs offer extremely poor performance when considered against the efficiencies offered by the modern equipment and technology of today.”

The company says demand for cloud computing – where data is held on servers remotely from the user’s home or office and is accessible from anywhere – is growing.

“At the core of cloud computing are data centres, which comprise networks of remote servers hosted to store, manage, and process data in place of local servers and personal computers," it says.

“Instead of buying, owning, and maintaining physical data centres and servers, organisations can access technology services, such as computing power, storage, and databases, on an as-needed basis from a cloud provider such as these proposed facilities.

“Organisations of every type, size, and industry are using the cloud for a wide variety of use cases, such as data back-up, disaster recovery, email, virtual desktops, software development and testing, big data analytics, and customer-facing web applications.”

Mullhaven Properties says cloud computing is cheaper, more efficient, and more secure than using one’s own computer system or servers to store large amounts of data, which might be sensitive.

The application shows buildings in the south west and north east corners of the site, which is surrounded by trees, would be removed.

The data centre could be constructed in the north east sector with the applicant saying it would have a lower impact on the environment.