Two companies drew British electricity for data centres last year. Only one of them can tell you how many people it employs.

There is a question that ought to be simple. A data centre draws electricity. Someone works there. How many?

The accounts are supposed to answer this. Two disclosures, both mandatory for a large company, both in the same filed document. The directors' report has to state total energy consumption. The notes have to state the average number of employees. Divide one by the other.

This desk read two sets of accounts at source on 23 August, as tagged data rather than as scans, and the exercise broke in a way worth setting out carefully, because the breakage is the finding.

Take Ark Data Centres Limited first, because it behaves the way you would expect. Its accounts to 30 June 2025 report an average of 139 employees, up from 107. Its directors' report gives aggregate total energy consumption of 280,597 megawatt hours, and it goes further than the rules ask by splitting out the part that runs the computers, 203,608 megawatt hours. One company, both numbers, and a reader can do the arithmetic.

Now take Vantage Data Centers UK Limited, which filed for the year to 31 December 2025 on 7 August. Its directors' report gives UK energy consumption of 505,866,500 kilowatt hours. Note 7 of the same document says the average monthly number of employees, excluding the directors, was Nil. It says the same for the year before.

Nil is not a small number. It is not a rounding. It is the company stating that it had no employees while consuming more than half a billion kilowatt hours of British electricity.

The people are next door. VDC UK Management Company Limited, part of the same group, filed for the same year end on the same day. It reports an average of 414 employees, 199 in operations and 215 in administration, on wages of 48.1 million pounds. Its strategic report says its operations are highly dependent on skilled employees. It reports no energy figure, because it does not hold the supply.

So the electricity is in one company and the people are in another, and no document connects the two in a way you could check.

None of this is hidden and none of it is unusual. Splitting the entity that owns an asset from the entity that staffs it is ordinary corporate structure, and it exists for tax, financing and liability reasons that have nothing to do with anybody's view about jobs. Vantage says plainly in note 7 where its directors are paid from. The information is filed, public and free.

The consequence is still real. When a site is proposed and the case for it is employment, the filings of the company holding the power cannot be used to test that case. You would need to know which staff in the management company serve which country's buildings, and the accounts do not say, because they are not required to. The share schemes described in that same document cover employees of the European business, which means the 414 may not all be here. This desk cannot tell you what share is British, and will not guess.

One more limit, and it is a limit on us rather than on them. Seven operators were tried. Five could not be read at all: Kao Data, Virtus, Global Switch, Telehouse and Equinix UK have all filed their accounts as documents rather than as tagged data, so a machine cannot open them and pull a figure. Two could. What you have read here is therefore not a survey of the data centre industry. It is two companies, and they were selected by which filing software their accountants use.

The honest statement is narrow. At one of the two British data centre companies whose accounts can be read by machine, the electricity and the employment are in different legal entities. At the other, they are not. Two cases do not make a pattern, and this desk is not going to build one out of them.

What can be said is what the exercise cost. It took a working afternoon, an interface most people have never used, and a step that fails silently on five companies out of seven, to establish that the simplest question anyone asks about a data centre cannot be answered from the public record for at least one of them.

That is not a scandal. It is a measurement problem, and measurement problems are how arguments get won by whoever is willing to assert a number.