National Grid buys Teesside land for 3.2GW substation

National Grid bought more than 70 acres at Dorman Point in Teesside, England, for a substation expected to deliver up to 3.2GW to a planned AI data center, according to The Guardian and Sky News. The seller was Teesworks, the public-private partnership behind the site. The deal was signed last week. Terms were not disclosed.

The substation is part of National Grid's Great Grid Upgrade. Balfour Beatty and utility Steel River Power are linked to delivering the power works, The Guardian and Sky News reported. Matt Pearce, National Grid's head of land, called the purchase an important step forward in a statement to MT Newswires.

For investors in the planned campus, the unresolved item is the operating and investment partner. National Grid has bought the land and is building the substation through its Great Grid Upgrade, but the preferred partner has not been finalized, according to the reports. That leaves grid work running ahead of a named tenant and shifts schedule risk to the data-center offtake rather than transmission capacity.

Earlier reporting put the footprint at 500,000 square meters, or 5.38 million square feet, with Teesworks as primary developer. The site is a former steelworks outside Middlesbrough, selected last year under the UK government's AI growth zone initiative and described as the largest brownfield development in Europe. The reports say the site has drawn interest from major US data center developers, including Google.

BP objected, arguing the data center would hinder its planned nearby hydrogen plant. The data center was approved last August, and BP scrapped the hydrogen project later that year.

The financing differs from Google's Arkansas project. Google will fund Arkansas grid work for a 600 MW data center, as Private Wealth Daily previously reported; at Dorman Point the substation is being delivered through National Grid's own upgrade program. The next visible milestone is the choice of an operating partner for the data center itself.