In North Yorkshire, England, a power station that has spent years marketing itself as a climate solution is preparing for a very different kind of customer. Drax wants to convert part of its biomass plant into a 1.2-gigawatt datacentre, feeding the servers that train and run artificial intelligence systems. Most of that power, it says, would come not from the grid but from burning wood pellets shipped in from overseas forests.

The scale is what alarms campaigners. According to an analysis by the Natural Resources Defense Council, based on Drax's own 2025 annual report, running the datacentre would require burning 4.9 million tonnes of wood every year. That works out to roughly 8.

6 million tonnes of CO2 annually, nearly double the 4.79 million tonnes produced by every flight departing Gatwick airport in 2024. Matt Williams of the NRDC called it a project that would become "one of the dirtiest datacentres out there." Drax has long defended biomass as carbon-neutral, or even "carbon negative," arguing that newly planted trees eventually reabsorb the CO2 released by burning their predecessors.

Independent researchers dispute this timeline sharply: some studies suggest it could take up to 150 years before such a system actually removes more carbon than it emits. For a technology sector racing to deploy AI within years, not centuries, that accounting gap matters enormously. The project has not yet entered formal planning, but Drax says it could be operational by 2031. It would join a queue of 315 datacentres seeking connections to Britain's electricity grid, together demanding 73 gigawatts, almost double the UK's entire peak winter electricity use.