The village's strange name has been puzzling place-name scholars for over a century. The most cited etymology derives it from the Gaelic cambas, meaning a bay or creek. But it could equally come from the Cumbric cognate - the Brittonic language once spoken across northern England - of the same root, camas, meaning a bend in a river or a bay. Either fits the geography precisely: Cambois sits at the confluence of the Sleek Burn and the River Blyth, where both waters bend toward the North Sea. The spelling, regardless of origin, was clearly influenced by French bois, meaning wood - a Norman scribe writing what made sense to his eye rather than to his ear. Cambois was once a township in Bedlingtonshire, which was part of County Durham until 1844, when boundary reforms moved it into Northumberland. Coal mining came in 1862. Cambois Colliery closed in the week ending 20 April 1968, ending the village's reason for existing in the form it had taken.

Before the colliery closed, the Miners Welfare Institute was the village's social heart. The current building - the fourth on the site, dating from 1929 - was built after fire destroyed an earlier one. Its original facilities included a large billiards room, a library and news room, a committee room, a 200-seater meeting hall, a smoke room, and a lecture hall where films were also shown. After the pit closed, the building's purpose dwindled. By 2023 it had stood empty for over a decade. That year, choreographer Esther Huss and her partner, the writer Alex Oates, reopened it as an arts centre and community hub. They called it The Tute, the old miners' shortening of Institute. Huss creates her own dance work there and runs a dance group. Oates runs a writing group. They began with no heating, scraping together funding to keep their classes free for the people of Cambois. In 2024 they launched an annual Rude Health festival, bringing what they called daring and anarchic performance from world-class artists. Our audience, Oates told the Northumberland Gazette, deserve the same calibre of work you would see in London or Edinburgh.

In December 2020, Cambois was confirmed as the location for Britain's first major battery manufacturing plant. Britishvolt would build a £2.6 billion gigafactory on the former coalyards next to the demolished power station, producing lithium-ion batteries for the British car industry. The plant would employ 3,000 people. Planning permission was approved in July 2021. The construction firm ISG started clearing the site in late 2021. In January 2022, the UK government's Automotive Transformation Fund invested £100 million, alongside abrdn and Tritax. It was to be Britain's fourth-largest building. By August 2022, with funding crisis already biting, construction was paused. Manufacturing was pushed back to mid-2025. On 17 January 2023, Britishvolt collapsed into administration. The site was put up for sale. Fifteen months later, in April 2024, the site was sold to a US private equity firm for £110 million - not for batteries, but for data centres. Plans submitted in December 2024 envisaged up to ten data centre buildings totalling 540,000 square metres, an investment of up to £10 billion. The promise of 3,000 manufacturing jobs became 1,200 construction jobs and an unspecified number of data centre staff. Cambois's industrial future, twice promised in four years, settled into something different again.