Blackstone To Invest $13B In Northern England Data Center Campus

The world’s biggest owner of real estate is spearheading a £10B investment, or roughly $13B, in northern England to turn a site once planned as an electric vehicle factory into a massive data center.

Blackstone plans to develop a hyperscale cloud and artificial intelligence data center campus that will be operated by its data center affiliate, QTS. The project promises to deliver 4,000 new jobs to Blyth, a port town in Northumberland, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced Thursday.

Starmer said the facility will create 1,200 construction jobs and an additional 2,700 indirect jobs over the course of the campus’s development. Construction is slated to begin next year.

Blackstone also vowed to infuse a new fund with $147M over the course of the project to assist the Northumberland County Council with job growth and training and investment support for the local government’s economic development plans, according to a council document.

“New investment such as the one we’ve announced with Blackstone today is a huge vote of confidence in the UK and it proves that Britain is back as a major player on the global stage and we’re open for business,” Starmer said in a statement, which comes a month after his government officially classified data centers as critical to the national infrastructure, a move that allows for better government coordination to protect against cyberattacks.

The data center development is projected to have a more than $6B economic impact in the region.

The Northumberland County Council in April approved the sale of Northumberland Energy Park Phase 3, a site that was originally to host a lithium-ion battery plant run by Britishvolt to make batteries for electric vehicles. That project fell apart last year when Britishvolt fell into the U.S. equivalent of bankruptcy, and the local government listed the site for sale. 

“The UK is a top investment market for Blackstone because of its powerful combination of talent and innovation along with a highly transparent legal system,” Blackstone President Jon Gray said in a statement. “We are making significant commitments to building social housing, facilitating the energy transition, growing life sciences companies and developing critical infrastructure needed to fuel the digital economy.”

Blackstone, which manages more than $1T in assets, has made data centers a central pillar of its investment thesis. It had a data center development pipeline in the U.S. and Europe of $18B as of March.

“The scale of the data centre opportunity is immense,” Global co-Head of Blackstone Real Estate Nadeem Meghji told Bisnow in an interview at the time. “It's the single most exciting strategy we have globally today.”