AI Developers Are Racing to Buy Decommissioned Power Plants — For the Wires, Not the Watts
On October 2, two unrelated filings on opposite sides of the Atlantic revealed the same instinct. In South Scotland, developer CX Tech submitted a planning application for a 1-gigawatt, £16.5 billion ($21.8 billion) data center campus on the site of the Chapelcross nuclear power station, shut since 2004. In Jayton, Texas, Crusoe filed for a $4.8 billion pair of data center buildings it classifies as "spur" structures of its existing Project Hyper campus more than 30 miles away in Childress. Neither bet is really about megawatts in the abstract — both are bets on something scarcer right now: a grid connection that already exists.
The Chapelcross pitch leans heavily on that scarcity. CX Tech is the development partner selected by NDA Properties, the commercial arm of the UK's Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, for the 55-hectare brownfield site. Its case to planners is that Chapelcross still carries a 132kV substation connection sized for the old 240MW station — infrastructure CX Tech argues the local network operator can reinforce and expand far faster than it could energize a greenfield site from nothing. The company says its eight-building campus will run on renewable power delivered via direct and private-wire connections, back up outages with green-fuel generators instead of diesel, and cool itself with closed-loop, non-evaporative systems rather than water towers. If approved this year, construction is pegged to run from 2027 to 2035.
That math only makes sense against how bad the alternative — a fresh interconnection request — has gotten. PwC analysts cited by pv magazine USA this year put power-transformer lead times at up to four years, with unit prices up roughly 80% over five years as orders for generator step-up transformers have nearly quadrupled (up 274%) since 2019, squeezed by a shortage of grain-oriented electrical steel and copper. On the generation side, GE Vernova's gas-turbine backlog hit 116GW last quarter, up from 100GW three months earlier, and the company is already taking reservations for 2031 delivery slots alongside rivals Siemens Energy and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. Set those two data points side by side and an already-energized brownfield substation amounts to a multi-year head start that capital alone cannot buy.
Crusoe's Jayton filing reads the same way at a smaller scale. Rather than shopping for new land and taking a fresh place in an interconnection queue, the company is extending outward from Project Hyper, the 1.4GW campus it built with Lancium in Childress that already carries behind-the-meter solar, storage and a grid tie. The two new Jayton buildings — nearly 1.52 million square feet combined — are explicitly framed as spurs of that existing infrastructure, with a targeted 2029 go-live even though Jayton is a physically distinct site. Disclosed investment across the Childress-Jayton cluster now totals roughly $16 billion — in the same range as CX Tech's entire standalone Chapelcross campus.
Pre-wired land becomes the new scarce asset
For the vendors and EPCs that supply this market, the shift in site selection is from "where is power cheap" to "where is power already provisioned." Decommissioning authorities, utilities and private owners sitting on old coal, nuclear or fossil generation assets with intact substations are becoming the counterparties in deals that used to run through greenfield land brokers. That also concentrates near-term orders for switchgear, protection relays and medium-voltage gear onto a smaller set of brownfield sites able to reuse existing transformer capacity, rather than spreading that demand across new builds that would each need their own multi-year transformer order placed from scratch.
We aim to create an infrastructure platform capable of evolving with the requirements of AI, cloud and high-performance computing. — Graeme Anderson, CEO, CX Tech
The approach doesn't erase the other bottleneck: community acceptance. Chapelcross's application has already drawn organized local opposition, including a Facebook group with roughly 700 members, and criticism from Scottish Green politicians who argue a nuclear-decommissioning site shouldn't host another large industrial load before its radiological legacy is fully resolved. A faster grid connection buys developers years on the equipment supply chain; it buys them nothing on planning risk, which both projects — one running to 2035, the other targeting 2029 — will still have to clear no matter how pre-wired the land already is.