The operator of one of the UK’s largest purpose-built data centres, Stellium Datacenters has welcomed the HM government’s decision to designate Cobalt Park as an AI Growth Zone.
The announcement by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology designated Cobalt Park alongside a site in Blyth where QTS/Blackstone propose a new data centre facility reported for delivery between 2028 – 2035.
At the heart of the Cobalt Park data centre campus near Newcastle in North East UK is Stellium’s 4,264 square metres REGO-certified renewably powered DC1. This is connected directly to the National Grid, offering abundant power for supporting cloud and AI workloads at scale. For optimised energy efficiency, Stellium benefits from the naturally cooler North of England climate and a location with the lowest carbon intensity output rating of any region in the UK.
Noel Meaney, Founder and CEO, Stellium Datacenters, said: “We are delighted to have been chosen to be part of the new AI Growth Zone in the North East and help support world leading AI tech companies with state-of-the-art data centre infrastructure, therefore playing an important part in ensuring the UK’s future as an AI innovator.”
He added: “This is a huge endorsement of our North East location, the quality of our highly scalable renewable energy-powered data centre and the IT engineering excellence of our on-site team.”
As a major carrier-neutral telecom hub, Stellium Datacenters offers high quality connectivity to local, national and global carrier networks. It is uniquely positioned as the only UK data centre with a secure landing station, housing the world’s latest subsea cable networks including AquaComms (to/from the US on the North Atlantic Loop) and Altibox (to/from the Nordics/Mainland Europe on NO-UK). This enables the facility to handle large international workloads to enable low latency, low cost connectivity to US, FLAP-D1 and Nordic markets.
Additionally, Stellium owns a 40 km carrier-neutral Metropolitan Area optical fibre network (MAN), supporting the North East’s digital economy, and hosts the NCL-IX Exchange which offers multiple peering opportunities to customers in the region, minimising their latency and data transit costs.
The Stellium facility has achieved multiple data centre and network ISO certifications and last year became one of the first data centres in the UK to achieve Open Compute Project (OPC) compliance, making it ideally suited to supporting the exponential demand for High Performance Computing (HPC) as well as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) workloads. As part of Stellium’s OCP Ready™ provision, it can provide HPC cooling of client racks from 10 to 200kW using in-row/rear door chilled water cooling. Bespoke designs can be supported for fully immersive cooling up to 200kW per rack.
