Drax is pushing forward with its plans to develop a data centre campus at its North Yorkshire power station, with the company partnering with Brookfield and its AI infrastructure platform Radiant on the project. 

While Drax initially set out plans for a 100MW data centre at its Selby power station, those plans have now grown quite substantially. In fact, through its partnership with Brookfield, the company now believes that the data centre campus could eventually exceed 1GW of capacity. 

To achieve those lofty ambitions, the site will need to receive significant investment, with Brookfield estimating that the project will ultimately need more than £20 billion. That figure includes IT hardware, and will largely come from a consortium of companies – including Brookfield and its joint-venture partnership with Qatar-based Qai, Radiant, and of course, Drax. 

The plan is Radiant will lead on data centre design, customer engagement and commercialisation, while Drax will provide the land and oversee power integration and planning. 

Using Drax’s existing power infrastructure

Drax has long proposed co-locating a data centre next to its power station, as it solves a problem many projects across the country are currently facing – access to good quality land and an abundance of power. 

The Drax site in Selby occupies more than 1,000 acres and has approximately 4GW of grid access alongside 2.6GW of active dispatchable generation. That means any new data centre wouldn’t need entirely new electricity infrastructure. 

But it isn’t a guaranteed win. In fact, while some will think Drax will be solely responsible for powering the data centre, the initial 100MW facility would actually import electricity from the grid using existing power station infrastructure.

The power station could come into play during later phases, with Drax planning to supply electricity directly from its generation assets through a behind-the-meter arrangement and long-term power purchase agreement – but that comes with limitations. 

Drax’s new Contract for Difference (CfD) agreement, signed in November 2025, covers approximately 6TWh of supported biomass generation annually between April 2027 and March 2031.

The agreement allows Drax to request permission to dedicate up to 500MW of generation capacity to a data centre during that period, but any such arrangement would require approval from the UK Government and the Low Carbon Contracts Company. That means it’s by no means a given that Drax will be allowed to actually supply the data centre it’s proposing to co-locate with its power station – and even if it can, it certainly couldn’t meet the full 1GW as proposed. 

In fact, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero reaffirmed in January 2026 that Drax is unable to supply electricity directly from its biomass units to a data centre during the support period without that permission. 

There does come the question as to what happens to the site after the CfD runs out in March 2031, however – and that’s likely why Drax is looking at the data centre plan as a way of securing the site long-term. 

Drax Group CEO Will Gardiner noted, “Drax Power Station is one of the few UK sites that can provide large-scale reliable power directly to data centre customers by utilising existing and underutilised generation capacity.”

Environmental questions remain

Whether or not Drax will be able to provide power in the short-term, some campaigners are vehemently opposed to the plan on environmental grounds. They worry that the potential wood consumption and carbon emissions associated with a fully developed campus would not be in keeping with the UK’s ambitions to hit net zero by 2050. 

The plant has already come under fire for reportedly burning rare forest wood to generate electricity, a claim the company has denied, but something that could impact the project as the data centre industry comes under greater scrutiny around its environmental impact. 

The Government has already rejected York and North Yorkshire’s bid for AI Growth Zone status, and while Drax has said that its plans are not contingent on securing that designation, it will still be hoping to receive Government and local support to push the data centre plans through. 

Thankfully, we might not have much longer to wait to see Drax’s final plans. Drax is preparing a planning application for its data centre development, with public consultation expected to begin in November 2026.