Brookfield eyes £20B AI data center on Drax's Yorkshire power station estate

Drax Group has signed an agreement with Brookfield and Radiant — the asset manager's neocloud platform — to jointly build an AI data center on the Drax Power Station estate in North Yorkshire. Investors liked what they saw: London-listed Drax shares climbed 8.2% in early morning trading.

The build rolls out in stages. Phase one targets up to 100 megawatts of capacity running from the first quarter of 2028, with another 500 MW switched on between 2028 and 2031. Beyond that, the partners want to lock in more than 1 gigawatt at the site, though they haven't said by when.

The money is enormous. Brookfield figures total investment, semiconductors included, could blow past £20 billion ($26.8 billion), starting with a £2.5 billion outlay for phase one.

The play lands as Europe scrambles to stand up the infrastructure needed to feed the AI boom, held back by steep energy and land costs. Dropping a hyperscale-grade campus next to an existing power station is one way to dodge both bottlenecks.

For Drax, it's a fresh act for a site long tied to generating electricity. For Brookfield, it's a bet that pairing power supply with compute is the winning hand in Europe's AI race. The story is still developing.