London

Overview

The London ‘Gigawatt Market’ is the largest colocation market by built IT power in Europe, and the second largest in the world after Ashburn, Virginia. Geographically, the London data centre market extends beyond the city and into surrounding counties as well as the M4 motorway corridor.

The London market is dominated by wholesale colocation (‘colo’) operators, which account for over 67% of London’s data centre supply. Unlike many European markets, London has not yet experienced large-scale data centre users self-building. Instead, dedicated “hyper-wholesalers” such as VIRTUS, NTT, NGD (recently acquired by US operator Vantage Data Centers) and Ark have continued to secure multi-megawatt deals from public cloud providers. However, US public cloud operators are assessing potential self-build cloud infrastructure expansions in the London region, as demand for cloud services grows. While London and Frankfurt have accommodated hyperscale and public cloud activity in wholesale facilities, AWS, Microsoft, and Google have now purchased sites in London and to the west of the UK capital. AWS has acquired three sites to the west of London and recently purchased the Ridgeway Distribution Centre in Iver. Microsoft have sites in West London and Wales and Google is yet to commence development of its site in Broxbourne. While it is clearly in the very early stages of development, a large self-build enterprise development may be a precursor for others to follow.