The UK’s first AI Growth Zone in the village of Culham in Oxfordshire may implement waste heat recycling.

The South Oxfordshire District Council, which encompasses Culham, is looking for a third party to conduct a “techno-economic feasibility study” into opportunities arising from a data center’s waste heat.

According to the government, a 100MW data center is currently being developed on Culham Campus, a tech park that formerly served as a Royal Naval Air Station, and there are plans to scale the facility up to 500MW and beyond.

According to the Council’s Local Plan 2035, which sets out a roadmap for future development, the area next to the data center will see the construction of 3,500 new homes, as well as 7.3 hectares of land designated for employment use. Both developments could potentially benefit from the facility’s waste heat.

The estimated duration of the £105,600 ($138,905) contract is three months and 30 days, running from March 2, 2026 to June 30, 2026.

Although the Council will be unable to implement a waste heat recovery program, the tender states that the study will “put the project in the best possible position for a third party of the successor authority… to decide to progress the scheme.”

Data center waste heat is primarily used as part of district heating systems. Queen Mary University of London currently uses waste heat from its data center to warm buildings on its Mile End campus, and the government is currently providing support to district heating networks across the UK looking to implement similar measures.

Culham is home to the UK’s Atomic Energy Authority, and AWS and CloudHQ are developing data centers near the area.

AI Growth Zones were first announced in January as a way of speeding up and incentivizing data center development in the UK. Other zones include Cobalt Park near Newcastle; an area along the Menai Strait in North Wales; and a rumored site in Teesside, located in the town of Middlesbrough.

A zone is supposed to receive access to a sufficient supply of power and enjoy loosened planning rules in order to enable developments to be approved faster. The aim is for each site to provide more than 500MW of data center capacity.

The National Grid, the UK’s grid transmission operator, projected last week that data centers could consume up to nine percent of electricity demand by 2035, up from 2.6 percent today.