Rolls-Royce Submarines partners with INFINITY on UK defence manufacturing capabilities

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Rolls-Royce & INFINITY defence partnership

Highlights

Rolls-Royce Submarines and INFINITY will expand Derby’s 200-acre technology park to add advanced defence prototyping, digital engineering, and additive manufacturing capabilities.
New facilities aim to shorten development cycles and support Rolls-Royce's increased manufacturing output and reactor deliveries, including under the AUKUS agreement.
The project is expected to create approximately 17,500 skilled jobs, supporting UK sovereign defence manufacturing and boosting East Midlands industrial resilience.

Derby site expansion and manufacturing plan

As reported by Rolls-Royce, the partnership centres on INFINITY's 200-acre technology park in Derby, where the companies plan to build out full-scale prototyping, digital engineering, testing and validation, skills development and supply chain collaboration on one site.

The project is designed to develop manufacturing approaches that increase speed and capacity while cutting material use and unit costs. Rolls-Royce's Nuclear Skills Academy already operates at the site, and the company is now working with INFINITY to add further capabilities for advanced defence components.

Those capabilities are set to include hot isostatic pressing, power beam welding and additive manufacturing. Rolls-Royce says the additions will shorten development cycles and give it greater control over the production of large and strategically important components for fusion, fission, defence and aerospace applications.

Lee Warren, Engineering & Technology Director at Rolls-Royce Submarines, says the company needs to keep exploring new technologies as its naval nuclear propulsion work grows, including higher manufacturing output and reactor deliveries to Australia under the AUKUS agreement. He says the INFINITY park allows Rolls-Royce to keep its Raynesway site in Derby focused on delivery while advancing next-generation nuclear manufacturing from purpose-built facilities.

Regional jobs and UK industrial resilience

INFINITY is leading a broader programme that brings together industrial partners, specialist suppliers, universities and skills providers. Concentrating these activities on a single site is intended to give companies operating at a high Technology Readiness Level better access to advanced facilities and help them build capabilities for highly regulated industries.

Professor Gary Jones, chief executive of INFINITY, says the agreement supports the sovereign manufacture of advanced components for the UK defence programme. Rolls-Royce says the added industrial capacity also strengthens national resilience by expanding support available for submarine programmes.

The project is expected to create about 17,500 skilled jobs, providing a boost to the East Midlands economy. INFINITY has also recently formed a strategic partnership with UK Fusion Energy to help shape the site's future capabilities around STEP Fusion, the UK's prototype fusion power plant programme in Nottinghamshire.

Rolls-Royce Submarines employs more than 5,500 people and supplies the pressurised water reactors that power every boat in the Royal Navy's submarine fleet. The business is supporting the Astute and Dreadnought build programmes and provides reactor plant support from Derby as well as at Barrow-in-Furness, Devonport, Faslane, Glasgow, Cardiff and Thurso.

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