Brookfield and Qatar's Qai back £2.5bn Drax data centre

The investment will be made through Radiant, Brookfield's UK-headquartered AI infrastructure platform, and Qai, the AI company of Qatar's sovereign wealth fund. The partnership aims to develop gigawatt-scale data centre capacity on the 1,000-acre Drax site. The first phase targets up to 100MW and is scheduled to be operational from the first quarter of 2028, subject to planning consent and permission to use power generated by Drax.

Site advantages and phased buildout

The Drax estate has 4GW of grid access, 2.6GW of active dispatchable generation and cooling systems already in place. Phase one will use an existing grid connection, while later phases would draw directly on electricity from the station's biomass generators. Phase two aims to ramp up to 500MW between 2028 and 2031, and phase three would add capacity after 2031, with the partners aiming for more than 1GW in total.

Brookfield said total investment in the development could exceed £20bn once spending on semiconductor chips is counted, including the initial £2.5bn for the first phase. The project is Brookfield's largest foray yet into the UK data centre sector. If built in full, it could become one of the largest data centres in the UK, according to Drax chief executive Will Gardiner.

Shares in London-listed Drax rose 6% to 863p on the news. The deal is a boon for Drax, which has faced questions over how it sources the wood pellets it burns.

"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," said Gardiner.

First investment from Brookfield-Qai venture

The investment is the first from the Brookfield-Qai AI infrastructure joint venture, established in December 2025. Qai is short for Qatar AI, a subsidiary of the Qatar Investment Authority, which manages $526bn. The venture is part of Brookfield's wider AI programme, which targets up to $100bn across energy, land, data centres and compute and launched in November 2025 with NVIDIA and the Kuwait Investment Authority.

Abdulla Al-Misnad, Qai's chairman and managing director, said the project is a major initiative under the joint venture and forms part of its international AI infrastructure strategy, drawing on both firms' expertise in large-scale critical infrastructure. Sikander Rashid, Brookfield's head of AI infrastructure, said the project would preserve hundreds of jobs and create many direct and indirect jobs around the broader Yorkshire area.

Grid queue bypass

Data centre developers in Europe are increasingly teaming up with power companies to bypass long queues for connection to the wider energy grid.

The companies said their initial assessment is that the project aligns with the government's new Data Centre Covenant, which they describe as a pathway to faster power and planning for strategically important data centres. Gardiner said the priority now is turning that ambition into delivery, "so projects like this can move at the pace the UK needs to compete for global AI investment."

Mahdi Yahya, Radiant's chief executive, said: "By designing, building and operating from the UK, it will give British researchers, startups and enterprises access to frontier compute at home."

Conditions and next steps

Progression of the first phase is subject to timely planning permission, regulatory and network approvals from the government and the system operator, and securing a suitable tenant. A community consultation will begin shortly, with the formal planning process following. The partners expect to establish a voluntary community benefits fund separate from and additional to any planning obligations.