Plans to invest £1.1bn in London Stansted airport and build yet more data centres that turbo charge planned total digital infrastructure spend to £25bn were hailed at the Government’s International Investment Summit today.
The latest schemes, including a host clean energy projects corralled together in an earlier Government statement, were hailed by Prime Minister Kier Starmer as drivers of the Government’s industrial growth strategy.
The Manchester Airports Group, which owns Standsted, aired for the first time details of its planned £600m extension to the airport’s existing terminal, alongside another £500m earmarked to improve the existing terminal and wider airport estate.
The terminal building will be extended by 54m towards the airfield side along its 306m existing length.
Its north extension will be built on land currently occupied by the Track Transit System, which will be replaced with new sky walkways to the three satellite terminals at the airport.
It will also deliver Stansted’s 14.3 megawatt on-site solar farm, which will support the airport’s current and increasing electricity demands.
MAG said it was in the final stages of the procurement process, with construction expected to begin in 2025.
The project will take between 2 and 3 years to complete.
Planning permission for the extension was secured last October, and Stansted today released images and a video to showcase its plans for the first time.
From the tech sector, US firms CyrusOne, Cloud HQ, CoreWeave and ServiceNow, said the UK will be the home for their data infrastructure worth a total of £6.3bn.
Taken together with previously announced investment from Amazon Web Services (£8bn) and investment giant Blackstone (£10bn) spending on hyperscale data centres could reach £25bn over the next five years.
CyrusOne, US-headquartered data centre developer plans to expand its investment into the UK to £2.5bn, creating over 1,000 jobs both directly and within its immediate design and construction value chain.
Washington DC-headquartered firm CloudHQ confirmed it will develop a £1.9bn data centre campus in Didcot, Oxfordshire.
Announcing its second investment in the UK this year, AI hyperscaler CoreWeave confirmed £750m to support the next generation of AI cloud infrastructure. This builds on its £1bn investment announced in May and the opening of its European headquarters in London.
Global AI platform and software leader ServiceNow also confirmed it will invest £1.15bn over the next 5 years, expanding its data centres with Nvidia GPUs for local processing data, and on new office space to support staff growth.
Logistic giant DP World unveiled its £1bn London Gateway expansion despite a row over its subsidiary P&O Ferries whichTransport Secretary Louise Haigh described as a rogue operator.
This includes building two new shipping berths, taking the total to six berths able to receive the world’s largest container ships.
The site will also see a second rail terminal added to handle the expected increase in containerised trade.