Doncaster is the UK's AI hub you've never heard of

The road to Doncaster from London is a good and fast one, but one less travelled. South Yorkshire’s new city has struggled to prevail since the area’s mining industry was decimated in the 1980s. Visitors tend to visit from across Yorkshire, but that is about to change.

Doncaster is ten miles away from Orgreave, a village primarily known for the Battle of Orgreave, a violent confrontation during the 1984-85 UK miners' strike between striking miners and police that is considered a pivotal event in the history of the UK.

While the coking plant is now closed and a housing estate stands on the site, the event remains a significant part of the village's history and is the subject of ongoing campaigns for justice and inquiry, more than 40 years later.

Hope, however, is open for this hitherto benighted and beleaguered area with an arts festival backing up recent announcements for its regeneration, an event that is just as important as entrepreneurship and local council support.

Artbomb UK in the city

The recent Artbomb UK festival centred in the city’s beautiful and inclusive Unitarian Church, is Doncaster’s festival of experimental art, ‘urgent ideas’ and collective imagination. ​Taking over shops, streets and unexpected spaces,

ArtBomb 2025 brought together artists, performers, thought leaders, communities and dreamers to explore how we live, and how we might live better. This year’s theme, A Meaningful Use of Time, invited audiences to slow down and tune in.

“Experimentation, arts and creativity are critical in building energy, community and innovation. It’s not always pretty and never formulaic but curious people muck about, find solutions and entertain themselves in between the cracks - be they lesser used buildings, marginalised communities or making tools do things they may never have been intended for,” said Mike Stubbs, Creative Director, Artbomb UK.

While visitors at Artbomb 2025 may have been encouraged to slow down, Doncaster is ploughing ahead and fast. It has long been a place that makes and moves things. Its rail engineering heritage, freight corridors and manufacturing know-how have shaped the economy for more than a century.

What’s new is the way those strengths are being recombined with digital capability and fresh investment to create a modern tech hub—one rooted in real industries, not just glossy co-working spaces. A visible signal of intent is Gateway One, the city’s flagship digital tech hub now under construction beside Doncaster railway station. Backed by £32 million, the five-storey, 52,000 sq ft Grade-A building is designed to be net-zero in operation.

The council and local partners position it as both a front door for incoming companies and a scale-up home for local startups, with completion targeted for early 2027. In other words: a permanent anchor for digital and AI businesses, in the most connected part of the city centre.

“Doncaster has innovation in its DNA from building the iconic Flying Scotsman to nurturing engineering legend Sir Nigel Gresley. Today, the city is writing a new chapter, recovering from deindustrialisation with bold ambition and more than £50 million invested in regeneration and restoration. “At the heart of this transformation is our new AI hub, anchoring Doncaster’s emergence as a northern powerhouse for artificial intelligence, digital innovation and future-ready growth,” said Damian Allen, CEO, Doncaster City Council.

Wider South Yorkshire strategy

The Digital Tech Hub is not a standalone bet. It slots into a wider South Yorkshire strategy to grow high-value, innovation-led sectors. In 2023 the region was named the UK’s first Advanced Manufacturing Investment Zone, a long-term programme designed to catalyse R&D, attract private investment and create jobs across Sheffield, Rotherham, Barnsley and, crucially, Doncaster.

The zone builds on the area’s established strengths in making practical, engineered solutions (from clean energy to next-gen mobility) and provides a framework for incentives, sites and skills. For Doncaster’s tech ecosystem, that matters: it means a pipeline of firms and projects that need software, data, automation, and AI applied to real-world problems. 

The city’s logistics superpower is another distinctive asset. iPort Doncaster—marketed as the UK’s most advanced multimodal logistics hub—brings 24/7 distribution capability, a rail freight terminal and millions of square feet of Grade-A space within minutes of the motorway network. 

This is where warehouse automation, computer vision, telematics, and optimisation software stop being buzzwords and start cutting costs and carbon for household-name tenants. Inward-investment teams now pitch Doncaster as the place where logisticians meet data scientists—backed up by real kit, not slideware.

Skills are the lifeblood of any tech hub, and here too Doncaster has been building quietly but deliberately. University Campus Doncaster runs higher technical pathways in data analytics and cybersecurity as part of the South Yorkshire Institute of Technology and has been investing in hands-on facilities such as a new gaming hub for game development and esports. 

At 13–18, Doncaster UTC (the city’s university technical college) leans into engineering and digital, with industry partners ranging from the AMRC to rail manufacturers—giving young people earlier exposure to real-world projects and employers.

None of this is flashy; all of it builds the vocational spine that scaling tech companies need. Rail still runs through the story - literally. The former National College for High Speed Rail site at Lakeside, which closed in 2023, is being repurposed by Network Rail as an education and training centre. 

That keeps advanced transport and systems engineering skills anchored locally, and dovetails with the city’s digital ambitions in signalling, predictive maintenance, and rail automation. The move also reassures employers that specialist training will be available at scale, right in Doncaster. 

Connectivity, of course, is table stakes for a tech hub. Doncaster’s mainline rail links are strong, but the city is also working to restore its international gateway. Doncaster Sheffield Airport (DSA) closed in 2022; since then, the council and regional mayor have pushed a “South Yorkshire Airport City” plan to reopen the site as a sustainable aviation hub.

In April 2025 the UK government backed a £30 million devolved funding investment to support the reopening, projecting thousands of jobs and billions in economic impact by 2050. Local leaders remain publicly committed to a spring 2026 relaunch, which would plug Doncaster’s tech-enabled logistics, aerospace services and business travel back into global flows.

For founders and investors, that’s a signal: growth here will be connected. There’s also something subtler - civic momentum. Doncaster’s elevation to city status in 2022 wasn’t just a new letterhead; it unlocked political leverage and a sense of identity that’s useful when courting capital and talent. Place-branding doesn’t write code, but it does help a recruiter close a mid-career engineer who wants both an interesting job and a place with a future. 

Doncaster’s tech proposition on the ground

First, it’s applied. Unlike pure-play software clusters, Doncaster’s tech is naturally fused to sectors it already leads: logistics, rail, advanced manufacturing and public-sector digital. Startups have immediate problem sets—warehouse robotics deployments that must work with night-shift crews; rail asset monitoring that has to earn its keep by cutting downtime; fleet electrification that requires data-driven routing and charging. That creates early revenue opportunities and deep moats for companies that can productise domain expertise.

Second, it’s collaborative. The Digital Tech Hub is designed as a hinge between the city centre, the station and employers—convening meetups, hack days and accelerator activity while offering grow-on space so companies don’t have to move to scale. Tactically, that’s smart: long commutes to innovation assets sap momentum. Keeping engineers, product managers and customers within a short walk reduces friction and makes serendipity routine. 

Third, it’s skills-forward. The Institute of Technology model puts higher technical education on a practical footing, with industry-shaped curricula and equipment. Pair that with the UTC, the retooled rail training centre and adult-learning pathways at Doncaster College, and you get a pipeline that can serve both startups and corporates. For founders, that means less time fighting the talent market alone and more time building. 

Fourth, it’s place-based, not parachuted-in. The iPort, Doncaster North and other industrial sites are long-horizon platforms for experimentation with AI-enabled operations, low-carbon tech and Industry 4.0. When a council talks about an “AI Growth Zone,” it lands differently if it can point to a 500-acre logistics park with an on-site rail terminal, buildings going up, and firms committed to trialling new tools in live environments. 

Challenges remain

Every emerging hub must avoid becoming a commuter satellite that exports its best people each morning; the solution is to keep stacking high-quality roles locally, which the Digital Tech Hub aims to do. Access to seed and angel capital outside the “Golden Triangle” is always tighter; here, the Investment Zone’s signalling effect and the region’s manufacturing investors can help. And while city status helps perception, sustained delivery—on time, on budget—will matter more than slogans.

The airport timeline will be watched closely by employers weighing relocation. Still, the direction of travel is clear. Doncaster isn’t trying to clone someone else’s tech cluster; it’s building one that fits its DNA. If you’re a founder working on applied AI for logistics, a railtech scale-up seeking a training and testbed ecosystem, or a corporate digitising supply chains, this is a city where engineers can look out the window and see the systems they’re improving. 

And as the Digital Tech Hub opens, the Investment Zone deepens, and international connectivity comes back online, Doncaster’s value proposition will only get sharper: an affordable, connected, industry-anchored home for tech companies that want to ship product, not just pitch decks. In short: the emergence is real. It’s anchored in assets you can visit, programmes that are funded, and a skills pipeline that is being steadily built. For once, 'tech hub’ isn’t a press release—it’s a plan being poured in concrete, wired with fibre, and populated with teams who build things that work.