One Week, £10B Of Data Centre Deals In The UK

Data centre developments with a projected end value of more than £10B have been sold, received planning or started the planning process in the south of the UK in less than seven days. 

The activity comes as the data centre development boom that has exploded in the U.S. rolls slowly across the Atlantic and into the UK. 

The schemes in question are large projects aimed at hyperscale data centre occupiers, a segment of the market that is being fuelled by expectations of growing artificial intelligence use. 

Colt Data Centre Services, a London-headquartered company, said this week that it received planning committee approval from Hillingdon Council to expand its Hayes Digital Park campus in West London with three new hyperscale data centres and an innovation hub.

The project will cost £2.5B to build, and the expansion will add 97 megawatts to the available information technology power at the Hayes Digital Park, taking the total capacity to 160 MW. 

Construction is expected to start in mid-2026, with the first data centre scheduled to go live in early 2029. The innovation hub will be designed to serve as a community space and incubator for digital startups.

About 20 miles north, Ark Data Centres is planning a £2B data centre near Watford and has started a public consultation on the project. The site, a former Mercure hotel, could host a data centre campus with up to 200 MW of power, Data Center Dynamics reported. The company is hoping to start in 2026 and finish what could become Europe’s largest data centre campus in 2029. 

Ark bought the scheme from a small local investment company that has made hay in the data centre sector, as Bisnow revealed.

That same investor announced last week that it had sold a nearby site to specialist developer and operator Equinix, which will now build a £3.9B, 250 MW scheme. 

Equinix runs colocation schemes, which are leased out to multiple data centre users.