UK backs $5.1B Equinix AI campus to boost sovereign compute

Equinix will invest $5.1 billion to build a 250+MW artificial-intelligence data-center campus in Hertfordshire, near London. The project, developed with the U.K. government, is pitched as supporting sovereign AI capacity and attracting large model training workloads from enterprises and research labs. New interconnect hubs and liquid-cooling infrastructure are planned to handle GPU clusters at scale. For investors and hyperscalers, added U.K. compute should ease capacity bottlenecks, diversify geography beyond Dublin and Frankfurt, and strengthen Europe’s options for regulated AI workloads and residency-sensitive data. The campus opens in phases from 2026.