A fifth of Britain's economic growth so far this year comes from artificial intelligence and its adjacent industries, according to the Bank of England's July Monetary Policy Report — and much of the machinery behind that boom sits in Slough.

The Berkshire town, long a national punchline, now hosts the largest concentration of data centres in Europe and ranks as the world's second-largest data hub behind only Northern Virginia. Its abundant power supply and dense fibre-optic infrastructure have made the M4 corridor the unlikely epicentre of the UK's AI build-out.

Governor Andrew Bailey was blunt about the unevenness of the recovery. "Strength in the economy has not been broad-based," he said at a press conference, noting that AI is helping offset an economic drag largely created by Donald Trump's trade policies.

Where is the AI growth actually coming from?

Not, so far, from the 'real economy' applying AI to lift productivity. Despite economists' optimism, there is little evidence AI has improved UK productivity numbers at all, the Bank's analysis found.

Instead, officials credited two drivers:

• A large uptick in investment from professional services-like companies selling new AI-powered products to clients.
• What the Bank called "activity in the upstream development and implementation of AI technologies" — the firms and individuals building the UK's homegrown AI sector.

That second category covers rapidly scaling start-ups such as Wayve and Elevenlabs, the expansion of US AI giants' UK offices, and the investment in and operation of the data centres that power their models — many of them, indeed, in Slough.

What do the official figures show?

The Office for National Statistics' August GDP figures back the picture. "Information and communications" output grew seven per cent year on year, while AI-exposed industries — law, accounting and research — grew nine per cent.

"It's a little more difficult to be sure how much of a role AI has had here," Berenberg economist Andrew Wishart wrote at the time. "Either way, it is these two sectors that explain the recent pickup in growth."

How exposed is the UK if AI momentum stalls?

Considerably. Strip out the tech-adjacent data and the economic picture turns markedly worse. Oxford Economics warned that a slowdown in AI momentum would presage a "substantial" risk of recession.

"Without the AI effect […] the UK's underlying growth would have been weak, at around one per cent a year," Oxford Economics lead economist Adam Slater said. "That leaves [its economy] potentially exposed."

One per cent a year is the benchmark against which the AI halo should be measured: it is what remains of UK growth when the artificial intelligence effect is removed, and it is the number that defines the downside if investment cools.

Why Slough?

The town's transformation carries a certain irony. In 1937, poet John Betjeman wished for "friendly bombs" to destroy its "hellish" industrial park. The noughties brought Ricky Gervais's 'The Office', which made Slough a byword for corporate banality. More recently, 'Slow Horses' set its grim, colourless Slough House there as a place where careers go to wither.

Yet the same town now supplies the physical infrastructure — power, fibre, server farms — for one of the few genuine growth stories in the British economy. Its data-centre campus is the largest of its kind in Europe.

For now, the boom holds. The UK's AI sector keeps scaling, US giants keep expanding their London outposts, and the data centres keep humming along the M4. Britain's growth, for better or worse, runs increasingly through Slough.