Vantage Data Centers enters London market

Vantage Data Centers has announced its entrance into London with the development of a 48MW £500 million campus. In addition, the company has opened a second 40MW data center on its existing Cardiff campus.

Situated on nearly five acres (two hectares) in the PowerGate neighborhood of North Acton, an established data center community in the northwest part of the city, 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.

“Vantage has experienced rapid growth over the past three years as we continue developing state-of-the-art data center campuses across EMEA,” said Antoine Boniface, president, EMEA at Vantage Data Centers. “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. With relatively little inventory available in London and requirements on the rise, we are ideally positioned to deliver for our customers.”

London is the largest of the FLAP (Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam and Paris) data center markets, buoyed by the U.K.’s leadership in public cloud infrastructure adoption. Findings from Structure Research indicate that hyperscale data center offerings currently account for 48% of the London market, which is projected to grow to 66% by 2027, making this a key time for Vantage to enter the arena.

“The continuing demand for data centers in London offers a prime opportunity for Vantage Data Centers to make its entrance into the highly-coveted market,” said Tim Kay, deputy director for technology, Department for International Trade in London. “Vantage’s presence in London will play a key role in enabling leading technology enterprises with additional IT capacity to support digital transformation initiatives and cloud adoption.”

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, located 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 extremely energy efficient 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). Conveniently located in the U.K.’s tech corridor near the M4 and just 100 miles (160 kilometers) from London’s urban density, the campus offers numerous connectivity options with low latency between Wales and London of less than 1.5 milliseconds. The sustainable campus operates entirely on renewable energy sources.

“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.”

In December 2021, Vantage opened a corporate office in the Farringdon district of Central London to support the company’s scaling operations across EMEA.