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A $13 billion “hyperscale” data centre in North East England proposed by U.S. private equity group Blackstone has been given the green light to go ahead by council planners.
Northumberland County Council said on Tuesday that the proposals have been granted planning permission after a unanimous vote in favour of the application.
Northumberland County Council said the data centre campus will represent an investment of up to 10 billion pounds and span some 540,000 square metres.
“Hyperscale” data centres are large facilities that are mainly used to provide data storage and cloud computing services to businesses at scale.
The council said along with hundreds of long-term jobs to operate the centres, it will provide 1,200 long-term construction jobs over several years of construction and also could support up to 2,700 indirect jobs.
As part of the deal, Blackstone will enable the council to set up a 110 million pound fund to drive growth and jobs schemes in the economic corridor along the “Northumberland Line”, a new railway line which opened in December 2024.
Previous plans for the site in Blyth, Northumberland fell through when UK startup Britishvolt collapsed last year.
Blackstone proposed building the data centre in 2024.
Global demand for data centre capacity has risen sharply, along with the energy needed to power them, as companies tap into new technologies to run their businesses, especially after the emergence of generative artificial intelligence.
Research released last month by CBRE Group found Europe could see a record level of new data centres this year as companies expand their artificial intelligence and cloud computing activities, but supply will struggle to meet this demand.
(Reporting by Lucy Raitano; Editing by Jane Merriman)
