This marks the first announced commercial capacity commitment in the South Wales AI Growth Zone.

The deployment will support AI training, inference, agentic AI and enterprise AI workloads for Nebius customers, including enterprises, researchers, startups and public sector organisations. It forms part of Nebius’ wider UK expansion, which included a commitment in June to build out approximately £1.7 billion of capacity across four UK sites, among them a deployment with Kao Data.

CWL1 has been operational since 2010 and is one of Europe’s largest data centre campuses. Vantage said the deployment builds on its existing presence in Newport, which sits within a wider South Wales investment strategy the company expects will deliver more than 1GW of AI-ready capacity across Newport, Bridgend and Bro Tathan.

“Nebius is scaling AI cloud infrastructure in the UK at a time when demand for domestic compute capacity continues to accelerate,” said David Howson, president, EMEA at Vantage Data Centers. “Vantage’s Newport campus provides the scale, connectivity and operational excellence needed to support that growth.”

AI minister Kanishka Narayan said the infrastructure would “create new high skilled jobs in South Wales” and support the government’s ambitions to expand domestic AI compute.

South Wales was designated a UK AI Growth Zone on the strength of its digital infrastructure, fibre connectivity to London, grid capacity and industrial base, and is home to the UK’s largest cluster of semiconductor businesses. Vantage said its Newport facilities are designed to minimise operational water use through closed-loop cooling that recirculates rather than evaporates water, and that its electricity consumption is matched with certified renewable energy; both figures are company-stated.

The deployment is a test of how quickly Growth Zone designation converts into committed capital elsewhere in the UK. Several regions carry the designation, but South Wales is now the first to show a live commercial lease against it, a marker worth tracking as the government’s AI Opportunities Action Plan moves from policy to build-out.

The Newport deployment adds to a run of large-scale Nebius capacity commitments over recent months, including a $10 billion, 310MW AI Factory in Finland and a $27 billion AI cloud infrastructure deal with Meta, as the company scales compute capacity across multiple markets ahead of Capacity Europe 2026, which takes place 12-15 October at the InterContinental London – The O2.

RELATED STORIES

Nebius invests $10bn in 310MW AI Factory in Finland

Nebius inks $27bn AI cloud infrastructure deal with Meta

Nebius invests £1.7bn in UK AI push with Kao Data deployment