In addition to a site in Enfield, the group is to build a new plant in Glasgow and re-equip Knowsley, near Liverpool.
The investment includes 22 MAN Roland Colorman XXL presses. These will be capable of running 120 pages of full colour at 86,000 copies per hour.
PrintWeek revealed last week that Park Plaza a 64-acre business park site at Waltham Cross near Enfield had been purchased by NI through a parent property investment company Northern Star Investments. NI has still not officially confirmed this site as the new plant's location.
But despite heralding the move as "one of the largest announcements in the history of printing", around two-thirds of NI's 1,000 strong production workforce are set to be made redundant. The group said that it wants to achieve redundancies through voluntary means.
"This is a long-range project taking more than four years to complete," said NI executive chairman Les Hinton. "Over this period, inevitably there will be job changes and losses as the new automated technology comes online. There will be no impact on jobs for at least two years and, wherever possible, reductions will be achieved through voluntary redundancy."
NI, part of News Corporation, said that the move had been made because it had outgrown many of its production facilities.
Major players from the newspaper printing industry were out at Ifra in Amsterdam as the news broke.
A delighted Norman Revill, MAN Roland web division director said: "It's absolutely amazing. It's a poke in the eye for the internet. We have a fantastic working relationship with NI."
Sun Chemical managing director Charles Murray described the deal as "phenomenal".
"We have been heavily involved with the project and we have the contract to supply inks to NI until 2010, so we're delighted," he said. "It also shows great confidence in the newspaper industry."
Fujifilm Graphic Systems divisional director Keith Dalton said that the announcement "shows that there's a shed load of life still left in newspapers".
Story by Philip Chadwick and Josh Brooks
