New £1.9bn data centre campus confirmed

A new £1.9bn data centre campus will be built near to the site of a former power station.

The firm CloudHQ, which has its headquarters in Washington DC, will develop the area in Didcot, Oxfordshire, in the vicinity of the former Didcot A coal-fired power station.

Technology Secretary Peter Kyle made the announcement as part of a statement welcoming foreign investment in UK data centres to "spur economic growth and AI innovation".

Building it will create 1,500 jobs, and 100 permanent posts will be based at the completed facility.

Data centres are large warehouses used to house computer, telecommunications or electronic storage systems, remotely powering services such as AI applications and streaming.

In Slough alone there are 34 of them, and counting.

CloudHQ has secured planning permission for the Didcot site, which will help towards the UK’s "growing demand for AI and machine learning", the government said.

'Ultimate reassurance'

Hossein Fateh, CloudHQ’s founder and chief executive officer, said: "We are very excited to deliver a hyper-scale campus in the UK that is truly an extension of Slough due to our private diverse fibre optic route.

"Our site enables us to build out our campus environment to provide scale and density to meet our customers’ requirements."

Kyle said: "Data centres power our day-to-day lives and boost innovation in growing sectors like AI.

"This is why only last month, I took steps to class UK data centres as critical national infrastructure giving the industry the ultimate reassurance the UK will always be a safe home for their investment."

A plan for another data centre on the power station site was previously submitted by RWE to Vale of White Horse District Council.

Didcot A, the former structure at the site, was first opened in 1970 and closed in March 2013. Three of its cooling towers were demolished in July 2014.

Four men were killed after its boiler house collapsed as it was being demolished in February 2016. A Thames Valley Police investigation into the incident is still ongoing.

Another three cooling towers were demolished in August 2019.

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