The North East just bagged a £10-billion data centre – now it’s teaching 30,000 kids to run it
Key Points
- The North East AI Growth Zone is evolving beyond planning into a major skills and innovation initiative.
- North East Mayor Kim McGuinness and Technology Secretary Liz Kendall announced a skills package alongside £10bn private investment from QTS and Blackstone for a hyperscale data centre.
- This includes £750k for TechFirst to give 30,000 primary school children early AI and digital training, contributing to a regional target of 80,000 students trained by 2029
- A new prospectus focuses on business adoption, innovation, and increasing women in senior tech roles, with Sage and Accenture leading initiatives including hackathons and partnerships.
- The strategy aims to anchor talent locally, build a major UK tech cluster, and ensure broad regional benefits from the data centre investment.
The North East has turned its AI Growth Zone into something far more interesting than a planning designation.
At the second meeting of the North East AI Growth Zone Taskforce on Tuesday (12 May), North East Mayor Kim McGuinness and Technology Secretary Liz Kendall unveiled a skills package designed to sit alongside the £10 billion of private capital already committed to the region by QTS and Blackstone for a new hyperscale data centre.
McGuinness is putting £750,000 into the government’s TechFirst programme, with the specific aim of getting 30,000 local primary school children some grounding in AI and digital skills before they hit secondary school.
That sits on top of £1.5 million the government has already invested in TechFirst across the North East, part of a wider national ambition to give a million young people direct AI training rather than watch them get left behind by it.
The bigger headline figure is 80,000. That’s the new regional target the mayor and central government have agreed for the number of North East students who’ll benefit from the training by 2029.
Another 1,000 teachers will be backed to teach AI in classrooms, and the Combined Authority has committed to 150 local work placements designed to keep talent in the region rather than watch it migrate south.
Speaking at the meeting, Kendall pitched the Growth Zone as a regional opportunity rather than a tech bauble, praising the “stronger partnerships, new opportunities for local communities, and shared sense of purpose” that have developed since the Taskforce launched in September.
McGuinness has also published the North East AI Growth Zone Prospectus for consultation, which sets out how the region plans to build on the Growth Zone designation to push skills, business adoption and innovation across more than just the usual handful of postcodes.
Part of that involves getting more women into senior tech roles. Sage and Accenture are leading a new push, with Sage signing two partnerships of its own.
The first, with Empowering You, makes it the founding partner of Empowering Women to Lead AI in Northern England. The second, with Techbible, will see Sage host a hackathon at its Newcastle headquarters in June, aimed at women with no prior coding experience.
Jonathan Cowan, EVP Product at Sage, said the North East has “everything it needs to become the UK’s next major tech cluster”, citing the mix of academic institutions, technical talent and a growing community of AI businesses.
The data centre is what makes the numbers stack up. QTS, owned by Blackstone, has committed £10 billion to building a new facility in the region, with the potential to anchor up to 5,000 jobs. That’s the kind of investment that justifies the wider skills package, and explains why Kendall and McGuinness are scrambling to get a pipeline in place before the construction cranes arrive.
Elsewhere, the team behind Sovereign AI, the £500 million national fund aimed at keeping British AI founders on British shores, is in Newcastle on Tuesday for an afternoon event at Atom Bank, talking to the region’s most ambitious AI startups about their growth plans.
The basic theory of the Growth Zone is starting to look coherent. Pull in hyperscale capital, build the skills base in parallel, and avoid the standard British problem of letting the benefits of a major industry pool in a single city.
