LONDON, March 5 (Reuters) - A $13 billion "hyperscale"

data centre in North East England proposed by U.S. private

equity group Blackstone has been given the green light to

go ahead by council planners.

Northumberland County Council said on Tuesday that the

proposals have been granted planning permission after a

unanimous vote in favour of the application.

Northumberland County Council said the data centre campus

will represent an investment of up to 10 billion pounds and span

some 540,000 square metres.

"Hyperscale" data centres are large facilities that are

mainly used to provide data storage and cloud computing services

to businesses at scale.

The council said along with hundreds of long-term jobs to

operate the centres, it will provide 1,200 long-term

construction jobs over several years of construction and also

could support up to 2,700 indirect jobs.

As part of the deal, Blackstone will enable the council to

set up a 110 million pound fund to drive growth and jobs schemes

in the economic corridor along the "Northumberland Line", a new

railway line which opened in December 2024.

Previous plans for the site in Blyth, Northumberland fell

through when UK startup Britishvolt collapsed last year.

Blackstone proposed building the data centre in 2024.

Global demand for data centre capacity has risen sharply,

along with the energy needed to power them, as companies tap

into new technologies to run their businesses, especially after

the emergence of generative artificial intelligence.

Research released last month by CBRE Group found Europe

could see a record level of new data centres this year as

companies expand their artificial intelligence and cloud

computing activities, but supply will struggle to meet this

demand.