This British tech champion had an £18bn vision for AI. Now it’s in turmoil

Matthew Field

Wed, February 18, 2026 at 3:30 PM GMT+9 6 min read

Martin Bellamy and data centre graphic

As Sir Keir Starmer unveiled a £31bn technology pact to coincide with Donald Trump’s state visit last September, one AI deal buried within the flood of investments raised eyebrows.

The Government announced that a previously unknown company, AI Pathfinder, would invest £1bn to build a data centre in Northamptonshire.

“Nobody had even heard of them before yesterday,” said one bemused industry source at the time.

Within days, AI Pathfinder revealed the extent of its ambitions, with £18bn of data centre investments across England and Scotland, exploiting Labour’s efforts to deliver an AI-fuelled infrastructure blitz.

Martin Bellamy, AI Pathfinder’s chief executive, featured in another government briefing in November on the launch of a new “AI growth zone”.

“AI Pathfinder is driving economic growth and social value through sovereign AI,” he said.

“This is a vote of confidence in the UK’s vision: delivering world-class capability while keeping sensitive data firmly on British soil.”

Martin Bellamy, AI Pathfinder’s boss, has said his company’s plans to build a vast data centre in Scotland remained underway

Yet just a few months on, AI Pathfinder is in turmoil.

The data centre developer’s website now features a placeholder image and nearly all of its staff have left.

AI Pathfinder’s £18bn vision is at risk of unravelling amid a bitter legal battle with Patrick Hughes, a waste management tycoon and one of the tech company’s biggest investors.

The dispute has already led to the High Court freezing AI Pathfinder’s assets, while a recent judgment also noted how the company had sought restructuring advice from Alvarez & Marsal and Teneo.

Bellamy told The Telegraph that his company’s plans to build a vast data centre in Scotland remained under way despite the dispute.

However, the unfolding saga threatens to become a cautionary tale for the developers, entrepreneurs and officials seeking to cash in on the AI gold rush.

Data centre frenzy

Global technology giants have pledged to spend more than $500bn (£370bn) this year on AI infrastructure alone to meet growing demand for computing power.

This frenzy has since spread to Britain, where there has been a surge in applications to build data centres.

Some £43bn in data centre investments have been announced in the UK since 2023, according to research by Oxford Economics.

A clutch of property developers with limited tech credentials has pledged to spend billions of pounds developing brownfield sites into AI hubs.

AI Pathfinder’s rise …

Against the backdrop of this spending boom, AI Pathfinder’s proposals would have made it one of the biggest data centre operators in the UK – aside from hyperscalers like Microsoft.

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The data projects were intended to cover two sites, in Northamptonshire and Ayrshire.

While the company was still in its infancy, the team behind it had plenty of experience developing major property projects, albeit not in the AI sector.

For example, Bellamy, 56, was also the founder and chairman of Salamanca Group, a property development group.

The business had previously led work on Gravity, a campus in Somerset set to include a £4bn gigafactory, and a former Britishvolt campus in Blyth, Northumberland.

Salamanca also previously owned Marina Port Vell in Barcelona, a superyacht hub once frequented by Russian billionaires such as Roman Abramovich.

A few years ago he and his wife Darina also hit the headlines over development plans near their Cotswolds home.

Pictured: Martin Bellamy and Darina Kogan-Bellamy at their Cotswolds home - Josh Adam Jones

Revealing its plans last September, AI Pathfinder said it intended to build a major site near Chelveston, Northamptonshire, and ramp up its project in North Ayrshire, at a business campus known as i3, with up to 1.5 gigawatts of capacity.

This would have made it one of the biggest data centre sites in Europe. In total, AI Pathfinder said it intended to build two gigawatts of capacity in Britain.

Bellamy claimed in September that the UK was at an “inflection point where slow or non-adoption of AI becomes an existential risk for the Government.”

He added: “Sovereign capacity is becoming not just strategic, but essential.”

The AI business’s board included Lord Johnson, a former investment minister under the Tories.

… and fall

However, despite its ambitions, there were few public details about AI Pathfinder’s funding.

Behind the scenes, seed funding for the business had been provided by Hughes, who invested £27.5m in AI Pathfinder and its parent company, Mulberry Limited, according to court filings.

Hughes, 55, has almost no public profile, but Companies House filings show he has helped to run a series of businesses in the construction and waste industries.

The latest is Valencia Waste Management, which was previously part of Viridor and controlled by private equity giant KKR. It owns 44 landfill sites around the UK and recorded revenues of £138m in 2024.

Hughes appears to have started ploughing tens of millions of pounds into AI ventures over the past year – including AI Pathfinder.

He is also the main shareholder in a separate UK AI business, Carbon3.ai, which has promised to invest £1bn in data centres around the UK. It is planning to build a network of AI data centres powered by landfill gas from Valencia’s sites.

However, his investment in AI Pathfinder has drawn the most attention owing to his dispute with Bellamy.

According to a High Court judgment, Hughes initially accused Bellamy of reneging on an agreement to stump up £10m in funding.

Bellamy denies there was any such arrangement and has said the legal claim is without merit.

This then led to a further clash in December, when the two entrepreneurs offered to buy each other out of AI Pathfinder.

Hughes escalated the spat in January by suggesting that he could appoint receivers to seize control of the business.

The allegations have recently culminated in Hughes freezing the company’s assets, based on claims that parts of the business were being sold below value “behind his back”.

The dispute is ongoing.

AI Pathfinder said it intended to build a major site near Chelveston, Northamptonshire - AI Pathfinder

Meanwhile, as AI Pathfinder navigates its legal battle, a team of the company’s former executives appears to have launched a separate venture, Sovereign AI.

The 20-strong team includes some of AI Pathfinder’s former executives, with the company hailing plans for its own AI data centre network, working with US tech giant Palantir.

Sovereign AI insists it is not connected to Bellamy or Hughes. Despite this, Hughes has also launched a legal claim against Sovereign AI.

A spokesman for Sovereign AI said: “Sovereign AI has no connection whatsoever to Martin Bellamy or Patrick Hughes.

“Neither party is a shareholder, a director, nor has any interest in, or other involvement with, the company. We are fully focused on building a world-class sovereign AI champion.”

Regardless, Bellamy says AI Pathfinder remains committed to its North Ayrshire project, which is “one of the UK’s most important sites for an AI data centre campus”.

He says his team have “worked tirelessly” with the local council and Government to ensure the region is a “priority for power delivery, planning and government focus”.

He adds: “A revised one gigawatt power offer is expected towards the end of February, with a planning application due to be lodged in the summer.”

How the project plays out will inevitably be vital for Labour, which is betting that a multibillion-pound data centre blitz will help the UK capitalise on AI.

Bellamy also believes his team can forge a British champion for AI infrastructure, but he has a fight on his hands to prove it.

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