Blyth Power Station being demolished. Photo Stewart Snowball/geograph.org.uk (CC BY-SA 2.0).
The Vantage data centre in Cardiff is set to be dwarfed by one to be built in Cambois, Northumberland, by QTS – owned by US private equity giant Blackstone. It has planned capacity of 720 megawatts, with work set to begin in 2031 and last for more than three years.
The Cambois centre will cost £10 billion, and will be built on land earmarked as a huge vehicle battery factory for the Britishvolt group, which collapsed in 2023. It will involve building 10 giant data processing buildings covering 540,000 square metres – the size of several large shopping centres – on the site of the former Blyth Power Station.
The site as a whole will consume a staggering 1.1 gigawatts of power. To put that into context, it’s equivalent to the consumption of a city the size of Newcastle, and on its own amounts to 3 per cent of Britain’s total usage in the summer months.
That’s Britain’s 21st-century economy in a nutshell. A site producing power is closed in 2001. A plan to use it productively, to manufacture, was formed in 2019, and collapsed in 2023. Now it is to be turned into a centre for energy consumption.
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