A flagship site with no power until the 2030s
The project was announced in 2025 as part of the government’s AI Opportunities Action Plan. It was designed for 50 megawatts (MW) of computing capacity, rising to 90MW, and more than 23,000 Nvidia graphics processors, the chips used to train and run AI models. Microsoft had planned to run its Azure cloud services from the site and had said part of its $30bn (£22bn) UK investment, announced in September 2025, would fund a supercomputer there.
UK Power Networks (the body that runs the local electricity network across London and the south-east) has told Nscale it cannot provide the full connection for at least seven years.
Nscale’s flotation now carries a new question
Nscale, which is backed by Nvidia, is a “neocloud”: a company that rents out AI computing power from its own data centres, and many such firms rely heavily on borrowing to build them. Microsoft and Anthropic are its two largest customers, so investors will want to know whether delays elsewhere could affect those contracts.
Nscale calls the delay a “London-wide grid issue” that has “no impact on our other contracts”. It continues to work with Microsoft in Norway, Portugal and the US, and says it remains committed to Loughton.
Data centres want more power than Britain uses at peak
About 315 proposed data centres have applied for grid connections totalling roughly 73 gigawatts (GW), according to figures cited by the Financial Times. Britain’s peak electricity demand is around 45GW. The Office of Gas and Electricity Markets (Ofgem) and the government expect many of these applications to be speculative projects that will never be built, but those projects still hold places in the queue ahead of viable schemes.
Can Loughton still be built?
Nscale says it is exploring other power sources for the site, including generating electricity on site, and looking at faster ways to connect. It will also need a new anchor tenant to make the site pay.