Drax and Brookfield plan £20bn AI datacenter hub at North Yorkshire power station

Drax and Brookfield have announced a partnership to turn the Drax Power Station site in North Yorkshire into a large-scale AI datacenter campus. According to Fathom News, which reported the plan, Brookfield estimates that total investment could exceed £20 billion, beginning with £2.5 billion for the initial phase.

The partnership was announced on Tuesday. Brookfield's AI infrastructure arm, Radiant, will build, operate and expand datacenter capacity at the site. Funding will come through a joint venture between Brookfield and Qai, a Qatari AI infrastructure investor.

A three-phase buildout

The companies have outlined a staged rollout. The first phase targets up to 100 megawatts of capacity and is scheduled to begin operating in early 2028. A second phase would grow the site to as much as 500 megawatts between 2028 and 2031, and a third phase would add further capacity after 2031.

The site itself is central to the proposal. It covers 1,000 acres, has 4 gigawatts of grid access, and retains 2.6 gigawatts of generation that can be dispatched on demand. It also sits close to the UK's fiber network. "If constructed in full, this project could become one of the largest data centres in the UK," Drax CEO Will Gardiner said.

Why a power station

AI datacenters draw large, constant amounts of electricity, and securing new grid connections in the UK can take years. Drax already has generation, land and cooling infrastructure in place, which would let the project sidestep much of the waiting that has slowed datacenter construction at greenfield sites.

The companies also framed the plan around employment. Gardiner said it could safeguard hundreds of roles at the site, which has operated for more than 50 years. Sikander Rashid, Brookfield's head of AI infrastructure, said the project would create new jobs across Yorkshire. Mahdi Yahya, CEO of Radiant, said it would give "British researchers, startups and enterprises access to frontier compute at home."

Nothing is committed yet

The £20 billion figure is Brookfield's estimate of what a full build could cost, not capital already pledged. Even the first phase depends on planning approval, sign-off from the government and the grid operator, and finding a tenant to lease the capacity.

Drax said a local consultation will begin shortly, with the formal planning process to follow. The partners also plan to establish a voluntary fund for nearby communities.

Why it matters

Grid capacity has become a defining constraint on where AI datacenters get built, and this proposal tackles that problem directly by placing compute where the power already exists. If the approach works, it could offer a template for repurposing other legacy generation sites — land, grid connections and cooling already in place — rather than waiting years in a connection queue.

The project is also positioned as a bet on domestic compute. Frontier-scale AI infrastructure has been concentrated in a small number of markets, and Radiant's pitch of home-grown capacity for UK researchers, startups and enterprises points to demand for local alternatives.

The caveats are significant, though. The headline £20 billion is an estimate rather than a commitment, and the plan still needs planning consent, regulatory approvals and an anchor customer before anything gets built. Until those are secured, Drax remains a proposal rather than a construction project. Even so, a £2.5 billion first phase with a 2028 start date makes it a serious test of whether legacy power sites can anchor the UK's next wave of AI infrastructure.