In a server hall on the edge of Harlow, rows of racks hum with the first pulses of what will become 22 megawatts of fresh AI capacity. On 8 June, Nebius and Kao Data confirmed the deployment under a 10-year agreement. The move forms one piece of a larger private commitment that underscores how market incentives, rather than central planning, are quietly extending Britain's technological reach.
The installation will host Nebius AI Cloud alongside its Token Factory managed inference service. It arrives as part of the company's £1.7 billion programme across the UK, which is set to deliver multiple NVIDIA-powered sites totalling 65MW by 2027. Four locations in all. Each addition tightens the link between global capital and local ambition.
A campus built for scale and efficiency
Kao Data's Harlow facility already runs on 100 percent renewable energy and employs direct-to-chip liquid cooling. Those choices matter. They allow dense GPU clusters to operate with less waste while meeting the relentless demands of modern training and inference workloads. For an operator focused on high-performance computing, the technical baseline is not marketing copy. It is the price of entry.
Spencer Lamb, CEO of Kao Data, captured the mood in the joint announcement.
Today marks a significant milestone in the evolution of the Kao Data portfolio and a landmark moment in the UK's AI ambitions. Nebius is an impressive global AI cloud operator, and we are delighted to welcome such a significant deployment into our Harlow data centre campus. This partnership proves that despite challenging macroeconomic circumstances, demand for industrial scale, UK-based, cutting-edge AI remains high, with Kao Data the perfect platform for the latest AI workloads.
His words carry the weight of someone watching sustained demand survive tighter credit conditions. Private balance sheets, not government grants, are funding the steel and silicon.
Enabling domestic AI builders
Andrey Korolenko, Chief Product and Infrastructure Officer at Nebius, framed the expansion in practical terms.
