UK gas firm plans North Sea offshore AI data centre

Orcadian Energy, a London-listed oil and gas exploration business, has revealed plans for what it says would be the world's first offshore, gas-powered data centre in the North Sea. The facility will be built 65 miles off the coast of Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, and will extract gas from the Earlham and Orwell fields via a single offshore platform. That gas will then be piped to an adjacent structure housing a power station, which will generate electricity to power a 200-megawatt data centre on a third platform.

A key innovation of the design is its approach to emissions. The CO2 generated by burning the gas will be captured and pumped back beneath the seabed, which Orcadian claims will make the data centre one of Britain's greenest. This feature addresses a commercial opportunity: the Earlham field naturally contains a high proportion of CO2, making cleanup for conventional pipeline use expensive. By deploying offshore and capturing carbon for subsurface storage, the company turns an economic burden into a selling point.

Unlike a typical gas field that requires a direct pipeline connection to the mainland grid, the Earlham site will transmit data back via cables rather than connect to the national electricity network. Stephen Brown, Orcadian's chief executive, framed the project within the context of AI's power demands, stating: "Demand for compute, driven by the artificial intelligence revolution, has upended electricity demand forecasts around the world. We believe offshore power stations coupled with offshore data centres could help to satisfy part of that demand." The company intends to sell capacity to major data giants such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft.

Orcadian signalled this could be the opening phase of a broader strategy. The company indicated plans for "multiple power stations and data centre halls that together could provide up to a gigawatt of power." Beyond capacity, the offshore location offers a secondary advantage: it allows data centres to be built "far from anyone's backyard," sidestepping the growing public opposition to large onshore technology infrastructure projects. To date, AI companies have pursued other offshore energy strategies—mostly experiments with tidal or wind power—but Orcadian's gas-powered, carbon-capture model represents a distinct approach to meeting the sector's surging electricity demands.

The announcement reflects a pivotal shift in how AI infrastructure planners are responding to power constraints. Orcadian Energy's proposal emerges against a backdrop of soaring electricity demands driven by AI workloads, which have upended forecasts globally. Traditional data centre locations onshore have increasingly encountered public resistance—the article notes "growing protests against vast new technology hubs being constructed around the world"—making offshore alternatives attractive despite their complexity.

The Earlham field itself presents a unique economic case. Natural gas reserves with inherently high CO2 content are expensive to process for conventional pipeline distribution to the mainland. By deploying the infrastructure offshore and capturing CO2 for subsurface injection, Orcadian transforms a liability—the field's carbon burden—into an environmental feature, creating what the company calls one of Britain's "greenest" data centres. The model also eliminates the need for onshore grid connections, reducing pressure on UK electricity infrastructure already strained by data centre expansion.

While AI companies have previously explored renewable offshore energy—the article notes that most offshore schemes to date have "mostly relied on experiments involving tidal energy or wind power"—Orcadian's gas-powered approach differs fundamentally. The company's indication that this could be "just the first phase of a network of similar projects, with plans for multiple power stations and data centre halls that together could provide up to a gigawatt of power," suggests this model may influence how the industry balances capacity, cost, and environmental claims going forward.