The £400 million INFINITY advanced technology park in Derby has entered its investment phase after Loughborough University, the University of Derby, the Manufacturing Technology Centre, and Infinity Technology Group Ltd signed a joint venture agreement to develop the programme.
The partners have also appointed directors to the company that will deliver INFINITY, giving the project a formal governance structure as it begins raising the capital required for construction. Professor Dan Parsons of Loughborough University joins Professor Gary Jones, Gregg Smith, and Susan Ambler on the board, while James Fussell of the University of Derby has been appointed company secretary.
INFINITY is planned as a 200-acre site for research, development, prototyping, testing, and manufacture of high-value components at Infinity Park Derby. Its promoters are targeting capabilities relevant to fission, fusion, aerospace, and other advanced manufacturing programmes, with the first phase of building development scheduled to begin in 2027 and full operation expected during the 2030s.
The employment and skills ambitions are correspondingly large. The partners project more than 2,500 skilled jobs directly, over 15,000 indirect jobs, and more than 1,500 trainees each year through the programme’s skills pillar. The development is also linked to more than 4,000 planned homes, a new school, and improvements to the A50 junction serving the area.
Professor Parsons, Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research and Innovation at Loughborough University, said the partnership could “accelerate the journey from discovery through to deployment”. That challenge is particularly acute in sectors where large components, specialist materials, long qualification cycles, and expensive process equipment make the step from laboratory work to repeatable production difficult to finance.
Infinity Park already sits inside one of Britain’s better-established engineering clusters. The site is next to Rolls-Royce Civil Aerospace’s world headquarters and within reach of Toyota Manufacturing UK, Alstom, JCB, and other major industrial operations. It also hosts the Nuclear Skills Academy and existing research, manufacturing, and logistics premises.
The location forms part of the East Midlands Investment Zone, which is focused on advanced manufacturing and green industries across designated sites in Derby, Chesterfield, and Worksop. Regional plans combine tax incentives, business-rate retention, infrastructure, skills funding, and research support in an attempt to attract private capital and commercialise technology within the region.
Derby has already started adding smaller pieces of infrastructure around the wider programme. In May, £1.5 million was committed to transform the former Nuclear Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre into the Infinity Prototyping Centre, providing flexible facilities for organisations working in the nuclear supply chain and creating an early operating capability on the site.
The full INFINITY proposition is broader. Its published model combines skills, prototyping, test and validation, supply chain support, digital engineering, and advanced manufacturing in one location, with processes expected to include hot isostatic pressing, specialised joining, and additive manufacturing. Those capabilities are intended to support components that are difficult or costly to develop through conventional small-scale research facilities.
Co-location can shorten some of the interfaces between design, process development, testing, and production. A company developing a large aerospace or nuclear component may need specialist manufacturing equipment, metrology, materials expertise, digital simulation, and validation before the part can enter an approved supply chain. Housing those functions near one another does not remove qualification requirements, but it can reduce the amount of work that has to move between separate organisations and sites.
Skills are a similar constraint. Advanced equipment cannot create output without technicians, production engineers, quality specialists, programmers, inspectors, and operators able to run it consistently. The planned training capacity is therefore tied directly to the industrial model rather than sitting alongside the development as a separate education programme.
The harder question is finance. Signing a joint venture and appointing directors allows the partners to approach investors through a defined delivery vehicle, but the £400 million programme still has to be broken into fundable phases. Buildings then need occupiers, equipment, customer programmes, and qualified staff before projected capability becomes productive capacity.
That makes the 2027 construction target the next practical threshold. Derby already has the industrial neighbours, transport links, and research base the programme is designed to exploit; INFINITY now has to convert those advantages into funded buildings and manufacturing assets, rather than another large technology park that exists more convincingly on an investment prospectus than on a factory floor.
