Hyperscale data center specialist Vantage Data Centers will enter the London market with the development of a 48-megawatt campus backed by an investment of £500 million (about $608 million). The company has also opened a second 40MW data center on its existing campus in Cardiff, Wales, further boosting its UK footprint.
The new campus builds on Vantage's rapid European expansion, which began in early 2020 with a $2 billion building plan targeting primarily second-tier markets. With its London site, Vantage is entering Europe's largest data center market with a considerable splash.
“With London being one of the largest data center markets in the world, this expansion further solidifies Vantage’s role at the forefront of the digital infrastructure revolution," said Antoine Boniface, president, EMEA at Vantage Data Centers. "With relatively little inventory available in London and requirements on the rise, we are ideally positioned to deliver for our customers.”
The Vantage LH1 data center will be situated on nearly five acres (two hectares) in the PowerGate neighborhood of North Acton, an established data center community in northwest London, Vantage’s London campus will total 430,000 square feet (40,000 square meters) across two 24MW multi-story data centers once fully developed. The first facility will open its doors to hyperscale customers and cloud providers in late 2024, which will mark Vantage’s 11th campus in EMEA.
London is the largest of the FLAP (Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam and Paris) data center markets. Structure Research projects that hyperscale data center offerings currently account for 48% of the London market, but will grow to 66% of capacity by 2027, making this an opportune moment for Vantage to enter the market.
Building Big with Cardiff Expansion
In addition to the development of its London campus, Vantage has completed the first phase (12MW) of a second 40MW facility at its growing Cardiff campus in Wales, the second largest data center market in the U.K. The new facility boasts one of the lowest power usage effectiveness (PUE) ratios across all of Vantage’s facilities thanks in part to its indirect evaporative free cooling system, which negates the need for compressors in the cooling cycle.
Once fully developed, the 46-acre campus (19 hectares) will include three data centers totaling 148MW across 2 million square feet (186,000 square meters). Located near the M4 and just 100 miles (160 kilometers) from the center of London, the campus offers numerous connectivity options with low latency between Wales and London of less than 1.5 milliseconds.
“We are delighted to welcome customers to our newest data center in Cardiff,” said Justin Jenkins, Vantage’s chief operating officer, Europe and president, U.K. “The significant investment Vantage is making in Wales is transforming the area into one of Europe’s leading data center hubs and a top cloud region in the U.K. This is great news for the local economy as the added capacity will attract more global companies to the region, ensuring additional work for hundreds of local contractors on site and creating new permanent job opportunities.”
Rapid global growth has been the theme for Vantage since 2017, when the company was acquired by DigitalBridge, which was seeking a platform to target the wholesale data center market to complement DataBank, its portfolio company for colocation and edge computing.
Since becoming part of DigitalBridge, Vantage has been boosted by billions of dollars in investment, enabling it to both build and buy data centers and grow its data center network into Canada, Europe, Africa and Asia.
