Digipolis The Digital Township  ·  Cover 01/21

The future of data centres  ·  A proposal

Digipolis

The Digital Township.

Every era's infrastructure built a town around it. This one is ours to plan. A masterplanned township with a compute campus as its catalyst: the campus pays for the spine and owns none of the town.

  1. Catalystthe compute campus
  2. Bufferlakes, berms, park
  3. Ringindustry that must be near
  4. Townreleased against jobs

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Fig. 1 — A Digital Township, built in order: catalyst, buffer, ring, town.

01 The unwanted neighbour

6 August 2025. Tucson City Council votes 7–0 against a data centre.

The project was linked to Amazon. The stated reasons: water, the electricity bill and secrecy. In Johor, the first stop-work order followed in August 2025, after villagers complained of night works and dust.

0Of Americans oppose a new AI data centre in their neighbourhood
0Of projects blocked or delayed in 2025

AZ Luminaria, 6 Aug 2025 · Gallup, Mar 2026 · Data Center Watch, Q3–Q4 2025 · Malay Mail, 21 Aug 2025

Fig. 2 — The mayor and six council members vote before a packed chamber; the country agrees.

02 Liverpool · 1715 to 1931

A dock built a city of 846,101 people.

Nobody in 1715 called the dock an unwanted neighbour, but it was noisy, it was dirty and it ate the waterfront. None of these cities chose to become cities. The infrastructure chose for them.

  1. 1715The Old Dock: the world's first commercial wet dock, room for 100 ships, a town of some 5,000 behind it.
  2. 1824–58140 acres of new docks and 10 miles of quay; warehouses, terraces and churches fill in behind. The Old Dock itself is filled in (1826).
  3. 1931846,101 people. Manchester and Tyneside did the same with cotton, coal and ships.

History of Liverpool; Demographics of Liverpool. The drawing is a diagram of the sequence, not a survey.

Fig. 3 — North up. Docks spread along the Mersey's east bank; the town grows east behind them. Schematic, approx. scale.

03 And the dock left

The ships changed and the docks closed. Anchors leave. Cities stay.

Containers made dock labour redundant. It took a Capital of Culture year and forty years of public money to stop the shrinking. Whatever we build around the data centre has to survive the data centre.

0Unemployment by 1985
0Leaving every year in the 1980s
0Of peak population left by 2001

Demographics of Liverpool; History of Liverpool.

Fig. 4 — 1931 to 2001: the south docks close, containers move to Seaforth, inner terraces empty.

04 The order never changes

Transport and energy. Then industry. Then people. Then civic life.

Transport & energy1761The Bridgewater Canal reaches Manchester; within a year, coal costs half as much.
Industry1780sArkwright's first Manchester cotton mill: brick, five storeys, a chimney.
People1830The Liverpool & Manchester Railway opens; 99 mills by then.
Civic lifeThenThe Royal Exchange, then the Gothic Town Hall (1877): the city builds its pride.

The only choice is whether it is planned.

05 I watched it happen, then we planned it

From an industrial park to a township.

Build where the power and the logistics are, and the town arrives on its own: shophouses, dormitories, markets. Haphazard, congested, and still a net gain. So the next parks were designed as townships.

0VSIP I, 1996: pure industry
0Urban land at VSIP Hai Phong: 1,100 of 1,600 ha
0Jobs across 20 parks and 12,000 ha
0Of tenant investment

Vietnam Briefing; Sembcorp–Becamex, 26 Mar 2025.

Fig. 5 — VSIP I: shophouses line the road outside the gate. VSIP Hai Phong: the town is planned north of the Cam River.

06 The new anchor

Compute is the new utility, not the new factory.

A hyperscale campus employs a fifth to half a person per megawatt: somewhere between US$12 and 50 million of capital for every permanent job. But utilities have always built cities, by bringing the industries that bring the jobs.

"Tokens are the new commodity. AI factories are the infrastructure that produces them." Jensen Huang, GTC 2026

VSIP I: 94,380 employees on 500 ha · AWS New Carlisle: 935 jobs for ~1.96 GW · Meta Hyperion: ~1,000 for 5 GW.

Fig. 6 — Permanent jobs. Each dot is 500 people.

07 What a utility brings · Loudoun County, Virginia

5.33 GW. US$1.1 billion a year. Then the county ended automatic approval.

Capital at a scale no municipality can raise: US$11–18 million per megawatt before a chip is installed. The anchor underwrites the spine. It does not, by itself, make a place worth living in.

0Data-centre load in the county
0Tax a year
0Residential rate, US$1.145 → 0.805 per US$100

Loudoun County FY2026 budget review (Loudoun Coalition); Loudoun County, Data Centers: The Loudoun Story.

Fig. 7 — The model county, and the stamp it brought down in March 2025.

08 The rationing era

Every serious jurisdiction now approves on the same test.

Bring your own water. Bring firm power. Use less of both. Amsterdam added 62 MW in 2023; Frankfurt has no large connections until the 2030s. A proposal that passes the test at district scale is the only kind nobody rations.

  • SingaporePUE 1.25. Half the power from green fuels.
  • IrelandBring generation equal to your import capacity. 80% new renewables.
  • GermanyReuse 20% of your heat by 2028.
  • JohorNo water-cooled approvals until mid-2027. Nearly a third rejected.

EDB DC-CFA2, Dec 2025 · CRU/2025/236 · EnEfG · Johor, Nov 2025 and Mar 2026.

Fig. 8 — Four licences, one test.

09 Two ways to fail, fifty kilometres apart

A city without an anchor. An anchor without a city.

0Living in Forest City a decade on, of 700,000 planned. The developer is in default.
0Of Johor campus applications rejected, after stop-work orders and a water freeze

China's western hubs run at 20–40%: demand would not move 1,200 km against a 20 ms latency budget. Cyberjaya waited 25 years for its anchor, and got racks, not knowledge workers. Tokens need no neighbours.

The order matters more than the money.

Fig. 9 — Left: Forest City's four islands, windows lit to occupancy. Right: the Iskandar Puteri site behind Johor's first stop-work order.

10 The concept

The Digital Township.

A masterplanned township with a compute campus as its catalyst: the first tenant, not the last. The campus pays for the spine and owns none of the town. The fence sits inside a public buffer. Industry is zoned before homes.

Fig. 10 — Select a zone to light it. It plays in order: catalyst, ring, town.

11 A catalyst that funded its town · Hershey, Pennsylvania

The factory paid for the amenities. The amenities became the employers.

Derry Township today: about 25,000 people. A township, never a city, and it outlived its factory. A compute campus is Hershey's factory with the payroll taken out — so the town has to be built from what it pays for.

PullmanRented its homes. Collapsed in the strike of 1894.
HersheySold its homes. Put the town's wealth in a trust.

Hershey Community Archives · Milton Hershey School Trust. Central Hershey, Cuba, had the mill but no trust: expropriated in 1959 and decayed with it.

Fig. 11 — 1905 to 2012: the factory, the park, the school, the 1930s Great Building Campaign, the medical centre. The factory closes; the town does not shrink.

12 Outcome 1 · Power

The campus is the reason the grid arrives. The township buys at its price.

Contracted load runs years ahead of real load. So the catalyst brings firm supply equal to its import capacity, and the township is the buyer of record. Then the campus becomes a grid asset.

0Demand response Google has under contract
0Of coal retiring in Sep 2031, no named replacement

CRU/2025/236 · Business Today, 11 Jul 2026 · The Edge, 25 Jun 2026 · Microsoft Dublin batteries sell frequency response to EirGrid.

Fig. 12 — Contracted versus drawn; import matched by firm supply; batteries steady the grid.

13 Outcome 2 · Infrastructure

Built for the campus, sized for the town.

A town produces exactly what a campus needs. Sewage becomes cooling water; refuse and sludge become power; stormwater becomes process water. Back come heat, grid reserve and flood protection. No drinking water, ever.

0Johor DC water: drawn 2025 → booked for 2030
0Tuas water reclamation plant, from 2027
"It's not the sufficiency, it's the management." Lee Ting Han, Johor exco, Nov 2025
Fig. 13 — What the town sends in, and what the campus sends back. Heat is ranked last in the tropics.

14 Outcome 2 · Infrastructure as park

The regulator already requires 50 metres. Build it as the flood system, the sound barrier and the park.

Every data centre already has a dead strip of gravel, wire and dry ditch. Here the fence sits on the inside edge and the greenway on the outside. Berms do the acoustic work; trees do the visual, dust and heat work. No routine on-site combustion.

0At the nearest bedroom, at night · tonal criterion
0Minimum, built as park before the first hall is energised

Johor DC planning guideline, Apr 2024 · Loudoun County noise page · City of Chandler · Virginia Tier 4 rule. Platform designed to the 1-in-500 level.

Fig. 14 — Section through the buffer, drawn to scale. Rain fills the lake, not the town; the berm breaks the line of sight from the cooling plant.

15 Outcome 3 · Amenities

The catalyst's rent funds a trust. Its construction leaves a neighbourhood.

Ground rent and rates flow to a trust that builds what an operator never would: the park and lakes, a technical college, a clinic that becomes a hospital, an arena, the civic hall. Build the workers' village as the first neighbourhood.

0Of Loudoun's local tax comes from data centres: the amenity budget
0Homes in East Village, London's 2012 athletes' village

Homes sold, not rentedAmenities held by a trustAfter-use planned before the first pour

Fig. 15 — Rent into the trust, amenities out. The labour camp becomes the first neighbourhood.

16 Outcome 4 · The ring

An industry follows an anchor when the link is heavy, urgent or tacit.

Heavy
Rack integration and burn-in. Switchgear, transformers, cooling skids, precast.
Urgent
Critical spares in hours. Chiller, battery and fire crews. Commissioning.
Tacit
Technician academies. Test labs. Hardware recovery every 4–6 years.
Outputs
Sludge drying, cold storage, reclaimed water, grid reserve.

Tokens are none of these. The software firms will not come. The suppliers will.

Fig. 16 — Tokens leave by fibre. Suppliers stay by road.

17 The order of building

No land moves on contracted load, only on drawn load.

Jurong and Suzhou lost money for seven years, kept the order, and became cities. The site is permanent; the tenant is not.

Fig. 17 — Each phase opens only when its gate is met.

18 The standard

A Digital Township meets rules already proven somewhere.

  • PUE 1.25 at full load
    Singapore
  • WUE 0.4, zero potable water for cooling
    EU
  • Firm supply equal to import capacity; 80% new renewables
    Ireland
  • 20% of heat reused
    Germany
  • 45 dB at night; no on-site combustion
    Chandler · Virginia
  • Ring jobs 10× campus jobs before a single home
    The Digital Township
  • Homes sold, not rented; amenities held by a trust
    Hershey, 1905–09
  • The construction village built as the first neighbourhood
    London 2012

Liverpool did not choose. We get to.

A standalone data centre is a consumer.
A data centre in a Digital Township is the catalyst.

Gigawatt campuses are being sited right now, on plantation land and on farmland. The shophouses will come either way. Plan the town they come to.

Back to the cover

— Notes & sources

The small print.

  • Opposition. AZ Luminaria, 6 Aug 2025 (Tucson 7–0) · Gallup, Mar 2026 (70% oppose) · Data Center Watch, Q3–Q4 2025 (US$152bn blocked or delayed) · Malay Mail, 21 Aug 2025 (Johor stop-work order).
  • Liverpool & Manchester. History of Liverpool; Demographics of Liverpool; Old Dock (1715, filled 1826); Port of Liverpool (7.5-mile dock line); Britannica, Bridgewater Canal (opened 1761). Illustrations are diagrams of the sequence, not surveys; population curve interpolated between censuses.
  • VSIP. Vietnam Briefing; Sembcorp–Becamex, 26 Mar 2025.
  • Jobs per site. VSIP I 94,380 employees on 500 ha; AWS New Carlisle 935 jobs for ~1.96 GW; Meta Hyperion ~1,000 for 5 GW. Jensen Huang, GTC 2026.
  • Loudoun. FY2026 budget review (Loudoun Coalition); Data Centers: The Loudoun Story. By-right approval ended March 2025.
  • Rationing. EDB DC-CFA2 (Dec 2025) · CRU/2025/236 · EnEfG · Johor, Nov 2025 and Mar 2026.
  • Failures. Forest City · Asia News Network, Mar 2026 · Sixth Tone · IDEAS via Malay Mail, 2018 · SCMP on Songdo.
  • Hershey. Hershey Community Archives · Milton Hershey School Trust. Derry Township population and dates to be verified before formal use.
  • Power & water. Business Today, 11 Jul 2026 · The Edge, 25 Jun 2026 · PUB: Tuas WRP · NEA: Tuas Nexus · The Star, 1 Jan 2026 · SCMP, 18 Nov 2025 · Bridge Data Centres: 200 MW cooled on treated sewage.
  • Buffer & amenities. Johor DC planning guideline (Apr 2024) · City of Chandler · Virginia DEQ · London Legacy Development Corporation · Microsoft: 90.9% of retired servers reused or recycled.

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