LONDON, Sept 12 (Reuters) - Britain's data centres will

be classified "critical national infrastructure", the government

said on Thursday, giving the servers and I.T. systems that

underpin the country's communications extra protection from

cyber attacks.

Britain said the move would reassure companies building data

centres, such as DC01UK, which it said had submitted proposals

for a 3.75 billion pound ($4.88 billion) investment in Europe's

largest data centre in Hertfordshire.

On Wednesday, Amazon's ( AMZN ) cloud computing arm, Amazon

Web Services, said it would to spend 8 billion pounds in Britain

over the next five years to build and operate data centres.

The government said the new designation would put data

centres on an equal footing with water and energy, and allow it

to minimise damage to the economy in the event of critical

incidents.

"Bringing data centres into the Critical National

Infrastructure regime will allow better coordination and

cooperation with the government against cyber criminals and

unexpected events," technology minister Peter Kyle said.

A number of recent incidents have highlighted how vulnerable

services are to IT blackouts. In July, for instance, the Crowd

Strike outage disrupted appointments at health services across

the country.

($1 = 0.7680 pounds)