Summary
- Fireworks has contracted Era4’s entire 5MW Chesterfield facility under a multiyear agreement.
- The site uses NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra B300 GPUs in HPE liquid-cooled modular infrastructure.
- Most electricity is generated from landfill gas, while the grid remains available as backup.
Fireworks has contracted the entire 5MW capacity of Era4’s data centre in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, establishing a UK computing deployment using NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs and electricity generated largely from captured landfill gas.
The multiyear agreement provides Fireworks with computing infrastructure owned and operated by Era4, combining direct liquid cooling, HPE modular systems, and on-site power generation.
Fireworks is operating on the Chesterfield infrastructure, while the companies intend to develop additional services for enterprises in the UK and Europe.
The facility uses NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra HGX B300 GPUs installed in HPE ProLiant Compute XD685 servers within an HPE AI Mod POD modular data centre.
This configuration provides high-density computing equipment supported by a cooling system designed to remove heat directly from processors and associated components.
Direct liquid cooling transfers thermal energy through coolant circuits rather than relying exclusively on conditioned air to remove heat from the computing equipment.
Although the method can support high rack densities, the facility still requires the systems needed to circulate coolant, reject heat, monitor operating conditions, and maintain equipment.
Chesterfield’s electricity infrastructure is a distinctive part of the deployment. Era4 captures landfill gas and uses it to generate electricity on site, supplying most of the facility’s power requirements.
The site also maintains a connection to the electricity grid for backup supply. This provides an alternative source of electricity when on-site generation cannot meet the facility’s requirements.
Generating electricity behind the meter has allowed Era4 to develop computing infrastructure without depending on the same grid connection capacity that would have been required for an entirely grid-supplied installation.
The arrangement does not mean that the facility has no connection to the public electricity system, nor that on-site generation can be assumed to meet every operating requirement indefinitely.
Power availability depends on the performance and maintenance of the generating equipment, the supply of recoverable landfill gas, and the design of the electrical system connecting generation and computing loads.
The use of landfill gas also requires appropriate treatment and operation of generation equipment. Electricity production and emissions characteristics depend on the equipment installed and the volume and composition of gas recovered.
Era4’s approach is intended to combine energy infrastructure and computing capacity within a single development model. The operator controls the site and supporting infrastructure, while Fireworks provides the software platform for running and adapting AI models.
Fireworks says its platform processes more than 40 trillion tokens daily, with over 95% of that volume associated with models specialised using customer data.
Those figures describe the company’s broader platform activity, not a measured workload or processing rate attributable exclusively to Chesterfield.
The companies plan to develop services for financial services, insurance, and life sciences customers. Proposed applications include model fine-tuning, inference, claims processing, underwriting, financial-crime analysis, and software engineering.
These offerings remain subject to further commercial and technical development. Their use by regulated organisations will depend on security, data handling, software integration, and the arrangements governing access to the underlying infrastructure.
Physical location is one component of those requirements. Running equipment in the UK can support particular data residency arrangements, but contractual control, administration, network connections, and access to information also influence the resulting security and governance position.
Fireworks has identified existing deployment regions in Germany and Iceland, and is expanding its UK presence alongside the Chesterfield installation.
Era4 has more than 40 brownfield and other potential development locations across the UK. The wider estate may provide opportunities for additional infrastructure, but those sites should not be equated with operating computing capacity or confirmed construction projects.
The company is also developing a separate proposed AI campus at Newport, Wales. That development remains distinct from the operational Chesterfield facility contracted by Fireworks.
The new agreement establishes an identified customer for the entire 5MW Chesterfield installation, combining computing, cooling, and local electricity generation within a single UK data centre deployment.
Era4 also describes environmental monitoring and long-term management of landfill sites as parts of its operating model. The company says it intends to publish independently verified resource-use data, but such measurements have not been included in the figures supplied for the Fireworks agreement.
Further expansion will depend on the ability to develop other sites with the necessary generation resources, electrical infrastructure, cooling systems, network connectivity, and commercial commitments.
