When a company chooses to invest serious money in British soil without waiting for yet another government handout, it is worth paying attention. Nebius has signed a 10-year agreement to deploy 22 megawatts of AI infrastructure at Kao Data's Harlow campus. This forms part of a wider £1.7 billion commitment across four sites that should reach 65 megawatts when fully operational in 2027.
The move builds on Nebius's first UK deployment of NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra infrastructure last November and will host both its AI Cloud and the Nebius Token Factory managed inference service. What stands out is not simply the scale but the character of the decision. This is capital responding to real demand from startups, enterprises and researchers who want to build and run advanced systems here rather than ship their workloads abroad.
Harlow's campus already runs on 100 percent renewable energy, including HVO generators, and uses direct-to-chip liquid cooling. Such practical engineering choices matter more than rhetorical commitments to net zero. They show how commercial operators can deliver both performance and efficiency when left to get on with the job.
Arkady Volozh, founder and CEO of Nebius, put it plainly: "The UK is one of the places where AI is being built, deployed, and adopted at the same time — by startups, by enterprises, and by the public sector. The work is happening here and the demand is here. And we are also here for the long run." There is quiet confidence in those words. Companies do not commit this level of capital to a jurisdiction they doubt.
A welcome contrast to top-down planning
Too often technology policy drifts toward central direction and public spending targets. The government's AI Opportunities Action Plan receives polite alignment in the announcement, yet the real momentum comes from private operators who have weighed risks, spotted demand and acted. Nebius maintains commercial and AI research operations in London and continues to hire engineering and research talent. That organic growth serves British interests far more effectively than another layer of bureaucracy.
Andrey Korolenko, chief product and infrastructure officer at Nebius, noted that the UK has become a major destination for AI. By bringing dedicated capacity online at Harlow the company aims to help local builders and enterprises achieve their goals without having to look overseas for compute. This matters for everything from financial services, where Revolut is already a customer, to healthcare and life sciences.
