When government officials came to the village of Tarluvada in Andhra Pradesh last year, they spoke of a golden opportunity. Google, they said, would build a $15 billion artificial intelligence data centre here. For the families who depend on small plots of land, the promises felt like a lifeline. Instead, many say their holdings were taken back by the state, leaving them without the soil that sustained them. It's a story of broken trust unfolding across just a few acres of rural India.
Hyperscale data centres are the engine rooms of the digital economy, demanding vast tracts of land, water and power. As AI booms, tech giants are scouring the globe for suitable sites. In this rush, the rights of local communities can get trampled. Tarluvada, a settlement so small it barely registers on maps, has become a flashpoint for a debate about who should benefit, and who should bear the cost, of the cloud revolution. The Guardian's investigation found that villagers had originally been offered compensation and jobs, but those guarantees evaporated once the land was transferred.
The scale of land: what does 'tiny' mean?
| Town | County | Built-up area |
|---|---|---|
| Rogate | West Sussex | 0.2 km² |
| Alvingham | Lincolnshire | 0.2 km² |
| Bishops Wood | Staffordshire | 0.2 km² |
| Turgis Green | Hampshire | 0.2 km² |
| Kirk Ireton | Derbyshire | 0.2 km² |
| Catworth | Cambridgeshire | 0.2 km² |
| Fulbeck | Lincolnshire | 0.2 km² |
| Hovingham | North Yorkshire | 0.2 km² |
| Norton in Hales | Shropshire | 0.2 km² |
| Postwick | Norfolk | 0.2 km² |
In the United Kingdom, our postcode-area analysis regularly ranks built-up areas by sise. The smallest town in the latest assessment is Rogate in West Sussex. Its entire built-up footprint covers 0.2 square kilometres. That is the equivalent of roughly 28 full-sised football pitches - an area small enough to feel intimate, yet large enough to host a village community.
When you place a data-centre campus next to that figure, the comparison sharpens. While Google has not released the exact dimensions of the Tarluvada facility, hyperscale projects of this kind routinely occupy sites spanning half a square kilometre or more. In other words, a single digital warehouse can easily swallow a settlement the sise of Rogate, and then some. The residents of Tarluvada, whose village is similarly compact, have seen their fields absorbed into a vision they did not choose.
Rogate remains a picturesque English parish, untouched by such upheaval. Yet its scale on our map underscores a universal truth: the ground beneath a community can be shockingly little, and shockingly easy to take away. At Postcodes UK, we keep track of these geographical realities precisely because they ground abstract news in something measurable. Knowing that the UK's smallest town covers 0.2 square kilometres helps readers picture what a 'tiny village' on the other side of the world might actually look like. The loss of a smallholding is not just a sentimental loss; it is the erasure of a place that, everywhere on Earth, would struggle to be seen from the sky.
The data behind this
This article draws on reporting from the Guardian's Environment section, which detailed the situation in Tarluvada. The built-up area ranking, including the figure for Rogate, comes from Postcodes UK's own analysis of official geographic statistics. No data from HM Land Registry was used in this piece.
In response to reporting by Guardian Environment. Analysis and figures by Postcodes UK.