In an initial phase Drax will offer land and access to the national grid through existing connections. It hopes to win regulatory approval to power the datacentre directly before 2031, securing future revenues as public support is scaled back. Under phase one the datacentre would start operating in the first quarter of 2028 with up to 100MW of compute capacity.
Drax is seeking to lock in a new industrial customer as its biomass generation is expected to shrink, tying the plant’s future more closely to digital infrastructure than to the power market.
Congested grid infrastructure and legally binding climate targets have raised questions about how a rapid build-out of datacentres can be powered without heavy use of expensive, polluting off-grid gas generation.
The company said the project could draw more than £20bn ($26.8bn) of investment and would be “the next chapter” for the former coal plant after ministers signalled they would limit its generation. The company has not said who will build or operate the datacentre, nor how much of the site’s output would eventually go to computing rather than the grid.
Those emissions are not counted in official UK totals because Drax says equivalent carbon is absorbed by trees grown to supply waste wood for the pellets.
“We must take control over the development of datacentres in this country and ensure that the country and host communities benefit from them,” the government said.