Tech industry taps old power stations to expand AI infrastructure

Microsoft, Google and Amazon are pouring billions of dollars into building data centres to power cloud computing and AI services.Booming demand for artificial intelligence is encouraging big tech companies and their suppliers to explore converting old power stations and industrial sites into data centres.

Daniel Thorpe, data centre research lead at real estate group JLL, said the developers of large data centre campuses were looking at locations including “infrastructure sites or power stations”. Microsoft intends to develop data centres on the sites of the old Eggborough and Skelton Grange power stations, near Leeds in northern England, with construction expected to start on the former in 2027. Amazon, meanwhile, is planning a campus on the site of the old Birchwood power station in the US state of Virginia.

That was encouraging an interest in less traditional options, analysts said. The different requirements of AI workloads present an opportunity to locate data centres in less central areas, further away from major computing hubs, because “latency”, or the time taken to send data and receive a response, is less important for training AI models.

Thor Equities Group recently acquired a former manufacturing plant in the US state of Georgia that chair Joe Sitt said was “equipped with transformers, water, sewer, and natural gas infrastructure” and “well-suited for data centre development”. “It may not be easy for the utility to flip the switch and turn it back on,” said Mark Dyson, managing director of the carbon-free electricity programme at the think-tank Rocky Mountain Institute. “Those challenges have come up in our conversations with companies.”

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