Northumberland CC won the economic development category at the LGC Award 2025.
Cambois, Blyth Datacentre Campus Project
Objective: Secure UK’s largest single inward investment into Northumberland; deliver nationally significant infrastructure; lever the largest value from the project and work in partnership to maximise the impact on the county’s businesses and residents
Timescale: Early discussions January 2024; outline deal agreed April 2024; planning permission secured March 2025; enabling works starting on site autumn 2025. Full build out of the site expected to be about eight-to-10 years
Cost to authority: To support negotiations and finalisation of the deal expert legal and financial advice cost about £180,000, which equates to 0.002% of the investment that will be made in the county
No. employees working on project: Initially the executive director for place and regeneration, director of economic development and growth, and executive director of transformation and resources, in support of the chief executive, leader and deputy leader. After the deal was made colleagues across planning, wider economic development team and others became involved.
Outcomes: A landmark investment into the UK; bringing a new investor and sector to the county and bolstering the UK’s data infrastructure and resilience; a strong partnership and, alongside the £10bn to be invested by the company, a £110m growth and investment endowment fund to be deployed across Northumberland to further drive jobs and growth.
Officer contact email: invest@businessnorthumberland.co.uk
We pride our county on being a ‘land of great opportunities’. With world-class facilities and stunning landscapes, spectacular castles, picturesque coastal and market towns, we believe there’s no better place to live and work.
Our economy boasts a growing, internationally-recognised offshore and renewable energy hub delivering clean and green growth. And we have a strong manufacturing base, including in pharmaceuticals and life sciences.
‘Driving growth and jobs’ is one of three corporate priorities for Northumberland CC. Our administration and economic development team has worked tirelessly in recent years to position our county at the forefront of developments in the digital economy.
This focused work reached a spectacular milestone in April 2024, when the council agreed a deal, with Blackstone, a leading global asset management firm to enable the development of a hyperscale datacentre campus’ at our Northumberland Energy Park (NEP3) at Cambois on the River Blyth – an area which had suffered economic decline since the closure of the power-station decades ago.
As one of the world’s leading investors, Blackstone is already at the forefront of data centre development. In 2021, it acquired QTS, which is the fastest growing data centre platform in the world, with 34 operational facilities in Europe and the United States.
This represents an investment of over £10bn. We believe this is the largest single inward investment in UK history. It will also deliver hundreds of long-term jobs to operate the centres, plus 1,200 long-term construction jobs over up to seven years of construction.
Growth and investment fund
As part of the deal, the council will receive a £110m fund which will drive long-term investment, including in growth and jobs schemes in the economic corridor along our fantastic, new Northumberland Railway Line – which connects Ashington to Newcastle in just over 30 minutes. This growth and investment endowment fund (GIEF) will maximise opportunities across the county to deliver further jobs growth.
Our assessment could see a total of 5,535 direct FTE jobs created in Northumberland over 20 years
The GIEF will provide a significant lever to the council to deliver on its vision, enabling the delivery of growth projects, whilst also advancing long-term, transformational investment programmes for employment sites.
The GIEF is a positive statement of investment which will support the acceleration of the Northumberland economy, in line with the council’s corporate plan and the Northumberland economic strategy to develop and grow the economy of the county and tackle inequalities whilst achieving value for money.
We commissioned an independent assessment of the potential economic impacts of the growth and investment endowment fund.
Our assessment could see a total of 5,535 direct full time equivalent jobs created in Northumberland over 20 years. This would generate £865m GVA in the local economy, with every £1 of GIEF investment generating £7.52 in GVA.
Cutting edge technology
A total of 19 hectares of land and 190,000sqm of premises would be developed to accommodate new, direct jobs, and in the process a further 5,295 construction jobs would be supported.
A total of 301 businesses would benefit from investment and support, and £381m in private sector follow-on investment would be attracted.
There are exciting opportunities to develop cutting edge technology at the forefront of new industries
There is also a joint Northumberland CC-QTS taskforce which is working across a number of workstreams, including skills, employment and social value, communications and stakeholder engagement and ecosystem and supply chain development, with the aim of maximising the project and the associated investment to the local community.
The UK has already shown strengths in data driven growth and productivity in the financial sector and increasingly in the health sector. However, there are significant opportunities for this to be extended to growth sectors in our county and the wider region, including clean energy and manufacturing.
With local and regional innovation and research assets and industrial clusters in these sectors, linked with the new and leading technologies delivered by the hyperscale data centre campus, there are exciting opportunities to develop cutting edge technology at the forefront of new industries.
Linking these opportunities with skills and employment opportunities for local communities will be key to ensuring the investments benefit Northumberland residents.
Critical national infrastructure
Through the council’s investment company, Advance Northumberland, we have made the NEP3 site an attractive place for global companies to do business and we are thrilled to have attracted the interest of one of the world’s largest investment firms with strong operational expertise and a track record of success.
Working alongside Advance Northumberland, our economic development team have used their experience and innovation in property and construction, preparing the site and ensuring the right foundations are in place – in particular access to a stable power supply to support such a huge development.
The data centre campus investment in Cambois is progressing at pace and such is its scale, it is now classed as critical national infrastructure.
A significant level of collaborative work, between the county council and Blackstone/QTS, alongside other national and local partners, has been progressing since the April deal, to provide the best possible conditions for a successful project. A planning application was submitted in 2024 and approved in March 2025.
Delivering data centre infrastructure is critical to the UK’s success as a digital economy, due to exceptional demand driven by content creation, cloud adoption and the application of AI.
This was underlined in September this year when the prime minister, endorsing our deal in New York, said the investment showed that the UK was “open for business” … and Blackstone’s investment was a “huge vote of confidence in the UK” and proved Britain was back as a “major player on the global stage”.
It was a massive vote of confidence in the county council and the county itself and demonstrated why we pride ourselves on being a land of great opportunities.