Drax has power for a £20bn AI data center, but no tenant yet

Drax Group told the stock market at 07:00 on 3 November that it had signed an agreement with Brookfield and Radiant, Brookfield’s AI infrastructure platform, to develop and operate an AI data center on the Drax Power Station estate in North Yorkshire. The partners are aiming for more than 1GW of capacity in three phases, starting with up to 100MW from the first quarter of 2028. Drax shares rose more than 8% to 878p that morning, Proactive Investors reported.

Brookfield estimates that total investment, including semiconductor chips, could exceed £20bn. The figure attached to the first phase is £2.5bn. That phase is subject to planning, regulatory and network approvals, an acceptable tenant, commercial agreements and a final investment decision by each party, according to the announcement.

No tenant has been named. Under the agreement, Radiant leads on design, customer engagement and commercialization, and will seek anchor customer commitments before construction starts. The Register described the £20bn figure as more ambition than committed money.

Drax brings power, in a market where businesses face long waits to connect to the grid, as CNBC noted in its report. The estate has about 4GW of grid access and 2.6GW of dispatchable generation across more than 1,000 acres, next to one of the country’s largest substations. Radiant brings the operating platform and Brookfield the capital. None of the three has yet named a customer, and until one signs, the 100MW first phase is a plan rather than capacity anyone can rent.

A power station looking for a tenant

Will Gardiner, chief executive of Drax Group, made the case through the site’s generation. He said the power station is one of few sites able to supply “large-scale reliable power” directly to data center customers, by drawing on generation capacity it already has and does not fully use.

The first phase would import power from the grid, managed by Drax. The second, which the announcement calls an ambition, would add 500MW between 2028 and 2031 and take power directly from the station’s own generation under a long-term power purchase agreement, subject to consents. A third phase after 2031 has no capacity figure attached. A planning application for the first phase is being prepared, and a public consultation is expected to start in November.

Gardiner tied the deal to the station’s future as much as to AI. He said the project “can help secure the long-term future of the site and protect hundreds of jobs”.

The announcement follows a setback for another project near London. In October, Microsoft was reported to have pulled out of a deal to anchor an Nscale data center just outside the city, amid delays connecting to the grid, according to the same CNBC report.

Who the compute is for

Mahdi Yahya, chief executive of Radiant, aimed the pitch wider than the largest cloud providers: “By designing, building and operating from the UK, it will give British researchers, startups and enterprises access to frontier compute at home.” Radiant describes itself as building and operating AI factories for “hyperscalers, enterprises, telecommunications providers, and sovereign institutions”.

Sikander Rashid, head of AI infrastructure at Brookfield, called the site “a critical piece of sovereign AI”. The investment capital comes through a joint venture between Brookfield and Qai, a technology company headquartered in Qatar, which the two announced in 2025.

The announcement gives no detail on how capacity would be sold, in what sizes or at what price. It names startups and enterprises among the users Radiant wants, and it makes construction of the first phase conditional on an anchor customer signing first.

What the timetable means for buyers

For a mid-market firm that buys AI through a cloud provider or a model vendor, the earliest this site could add capacity is the first quarter of 2028, and only if every condition in the filing is met. Until then, the compute those firms rent runs in data centers that are already built or already under construction elsewhere.

Drax shares added more than 8% on the day on an agreement with no tenant, no planning consent and no final investment decision. The parts of the deal that already exist are the grid connection, the generation behind it and the land.

Gardiner said in the announcement that “the priority now must be turning that ambition into delivery”. Under the terms Drax published, delivery of the first phase cannot start until Radiant signs an anchor customer. Until it does, the 1GW figure measures a power station’s spare capacity rather than compute anyone can buy.