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Canadian investor Brookfield and Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund are making an initial £2.5B investment in a UK data centre project that could eventually total around 1 gigawatt of computing power.
Brookfield and the Qatar Investment Authority have teamed up with UK power generation company Drax to build a data centre campus at Drax’s power station site in north Yorkshire.
The joint venture will look to build an initial data centre that will provide 100 megawatts of computing power and could be operational by 2028 as long as planning consent and permission to use the power generated by Drax for a data centre can be secured.
Drax runs a biomass power generation site and has excess capacity that it is looking to monetise by diverting it to a data centre development. The move is part of a growing trend of data centre developers teaming up with power companies in Europe to bypass long queues for connection to the wider energy grid.
The first phase of the project would utilise an existing grid connection Drax has at its power station, while subsequent phases would directly draw on energy produced by the site’s biomass generators.
The investment will be made through Radiant, Brookfield’s AI infrastructure platform, and Qai, a similar platform for Qatar’s $526B sovereign wealth fund.
Phase 2 looks to add another 400 MW of capacity by 2031, and there is ambition to grow the computing power to more than 1 GW beyond that date.
Brookfield said the total investment in the campus could exceed £20B once spending on semiconductor chips is taken into account.
The project is Brookfield’s largest foray yet into the UK data centre sector.
The investment is a boon for Drax, which has faced questions over how it sources the wood pellets it burns. It began life as a coal-fired power station in the mid-1960s but converted to biomass generation in the 2010s.
“By designing, building and operating from the UK, it will give British researchers, startups and enterprises access to frontier compute at home,” Radiant CEO Mahdi Yahya said in a statement.
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