Plans are under way to turn the former Quest Pit quarry near Stewartby in Bedfordshire into a £9.5bn data centre campus next to the proposed Universal theme park. Quest Park wants to change the site’s use from a film studio into a complex of four data centre buildings on a 143-acre site off Ampthill Road.
The scheme is being handled through a Development Consent Order because the Secretary of State has judged it to be of national significance. David Kohler said the project would cost £9.5bn to build and would take two to three years to win the permission change, followed by a further two years to construct the campus.
Kohler said the proposal would be one of the largest in the UK in terms of power. The campus is designed for up to 720 megawatts, with each building to be powered individually by a proposed gas generating station on the site. Quest Park says the project would create up to 1,145 jobs, with a separate estimate putting direct jobs at between 710 and 1,145 when it opens.
The company also says the development would meet around a third of the UK’s current data centre demand and provide nearly 2.9 times the capacity of the country’s largest existing facility. It also includes a digital training facility for students of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, a detail that is meant to soften the scale of a project that is almost impossible to miss.
That scale is exactly what has unsettled local voices. Sue Clark said the area is already carrying too many major projects, pointing to Universal, East West Rail and the Marston Valley 5,000-housing development in a very small area of the Marston Vale. Her criticism lands at the same moment the development is trying to clear the first big planning hurdle.
Data centres are the physical buildings that store and run the software and data behind much of the internet, and the UK already has an estimated 500 of them. The Quest Pit site had planning permission for a film studio in 2023, but Quest Park is now asking for a change of use. The next step is further consultation before the Development Consent Order process can be completed and a decision made on whether the switch goes ahead.
