Atom Valley: Manchester's £1bn Manufacturing Bet
The Short Run: Atom Valley is a £1bn advanced manufacturing zone taking shape across Bury, Oldham and Rochdale, set to bring around 20,000 jobs and 1.6 million square metres of employment space. These aren’t standard warehouses, they’re labs, cleanrooms and connected factories that demand serious cabling and power behind the walls. And the ripple effect reaches every existing firm in the three boroughs.
Something big is taking shape on the northern edge of Greater Manchester. Atom Valley, the advanced manufacturing and materials cluster spanning Bury, Oldham and Rochdale, has moved from plans on paper to spades in the ground. The first flagship building, the Sustainable Materials and Manufacturing Centre at Kingsway Business Park in Rochdale, is completing through 2026, and a new Mayoral Development Corporation for the Northern Gateway site was set up at the start of the year to drive the rest.
The scale is the sort you don’t often see for this part of the region. Atom Valley is valued at over £1bn, with the potential to deliver around 20,000 high-skilled jobs and 1.6 million square metres of employment floorspace across the three boroughs. Rochdale Council alone put a further £12m into the first centre in its 2026 budget.
What’s easy to miss, though, is what these buildings actually are. And that’s where the story gets interesting.
These aren’t sheds with a few sockets
Atom Valley is aimed at advanced manufacturing, materials science and R&D. That’s a very different animal to a distribution warehouse or a standard office block.
A modern advanced-manufacturing building is a mix of laboratories, workshops, metrology suites, design studios and offices, often under one roof. The Sustainable Materials and Manufacturing Centre alone packs labs, workshops, analysis studios and flexible workspace into around 2,700 square metres. Buildings like that run on data at a scale most offices never touch: connected production machinery, sensors across the line, high-bandwidth links moving research datasets around, precision equipment that can’t tolerate a dropped connection mid-process.
The infrastructure behind the walls has to match. That’s not a criticism of anyone, it’s just the nature of the work these places are built to do.
What that means for the cabling and power
Once you look at a building like this through an infrastructure lens, a few things stand out.
The cabling backbone has to carry far more than a standard fit-out. Cat6a structured cabling becomes the sensible floor for copper rather than a premium option, because it carries 10 gigabits over a full 100-metre run and comfortably feeds high-density Wi-Fi and connected equipment. Anything longer than 100 metres, or linking separate buildings across a large site, needs a fibre optic backbone. On sites this size, that’s most of them.
Power and comms have to be designed together. In a technical building the network and the electrical installation can’t be planned in isolation. Comms rooms need proper power, cooling and containment, because a rack full of switches in a warm cupboard is a failure waiting to happen. Precision manufacturing and lab equipment also bring their own clean-power and resilience demands, which is a world away from wiring a few desks.
Then there’s the environment itself. Cabling a cleanroom or a metrology suite isn’t the same as cabling an open-plan office. Containment routes, cable types and testing all have to suit a space where dust, interference and tolerances actually matter. And on a large industrial floor, a lot of the work happens at height, over racking and plant, which is a different job again.
None of this is exotic once you know the trade. But it does mean the infrastructure on a site like Atom Valley is a specialist piece of the build, not an afterthought bolted on at the end.
The bit that tends to get underestimated
On any major development, the network is one of the last things people think about and one of the first things that causes grief if it’s wrong.
Get it right and it disappears into the background, which is exactly what you want. Get it wrong, and it shows up as dropped connections, failed production runs and expensive rework long after the ribbon’s been cut. On a research or manufacturing site, that downtime isn’t an inconvenience, it’s lost work and lost money. The buildings that open smoothly are the ones where the cabling and power were designed in from the start, alongside the structure, not squeezed in afterwards.
A boost for the three boroughs
Step back from the technical detail and the bigger picture is simply good news for this corner of Greater Manchester.
Around 20,000 jobs and a whole advanced-manufacturing supply chain are landing in Oldham, Bury and Rochdale, areas that have waited a long time for investment on this scale. That doesn’t just fill the flagship buildings. It ripples outward: existing firms across the three boroughs stand to grow on the back of it, taking on new work, expanding into bigger units and hiring locally as the cluster builds around them.
For a part of the region that once ran on cotton and coal, a £1bn bet on advanced manufacturing is a real vote of confidence. Atom Valley is worth watching, and worth being ready for.
Need help with data cabling in Greater Manchester?
Viking Communications designs and installs structured cabling, fibre and comms-room power for commercial and industrial sites across Oldham, Bury, Rochdale and the wider UK, backed by a 25-year manufacturer warranty on the structured cabling and a fully accredited team. Site surveys are free, with no hidden charges in the quote.
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