Drax, the UK's single largest CO₂ emitter, has struck a deal with Brookfield and AI platform Radiant to build a 1GW+ datacentre on its North Yorkshire site. The project could attract over £20bn in investment and begin operations by early 2028, initially drawing power from the national grid through Drax's existing connections before the plant aims to supply the datacentre directly by the early 2030s. The timing is not coincidental. The government has signalled that Drax will play a 'much more limited role' in UK power generation, halving its current £2m-a-day subsidy from 2027 to 2031. The datacentre deal offers Drax a replacement revenue stream and a reason to keep burning woody biomass pellets — this time to feed AI servers rather than the national grid. Drax's share price jumped nearly 9%, pushing its market value toward £3bn. The carbon accounting here is creative, to put it mildly. Drax produces almost 5% of the UK's electricity from biomass and is the country's largest single-source emitter, but the UK government does not count these emissions because Drax claims the carbon is offset by growing replacement trees. Analysts have long disputed this claim. Linking that same contested energy source to a new, massive datacentre does not resolve the accounting problem — it scales it. Drax CEO Will Gardiner framed the project as securing 'the long-term future of the site' while 'strengthening sovereign AI capability.' The language is calibrated: jobs, reindustrialisation, national security. These are the words that get planning permission. The underlying structure is a polluting asset owner leveraging its grid connection — the real bottleneck in UK energy infrastructure — to extract ongoing value from a site that government policy was designed to wind down. The UK grid is already congested. The government's draft national policy statement on datacentres, published a week before this deal, acknowledged their strategic importance but raised the question that hangs over every AI infrastructure announcement in Britain: where does the clean power come from? Without a credible answer, the default is expensive, polluting off-grid gas generation or, as here, biomass burning whose carbon neutrality rests on disputed claims. Phase one envisions 100MW of compute capacity from Q1 2028, scaling to over 1GW. To put that in context, 1GW is roughly the output of a large nuclear power station. Drax hopes to clear regulatory approvals to supply the datacentre directly before its subsidy period ends in 2031, effectively replacing one government-adjacent revenue stream with another. The infrastructure investor Brookfield and the AI platform Radiant provide the capital and the demand; Drax provides the land, the grid connection, and the political cover. The 20-year question is whether the UK is building genuine sovereign AI capability or simply giving incumbent fossil-era energy companies a second act. If the datacentre runs on disputed-carbon biomass through the 2030s, the UK will have added a gigawatt of AI compute powered by its most controversial energy source — and called it progress.
