Pinewood Owner Swaps Studios For Big New Data Centre In Expansion Plans

The real estate fund manager that owns Pinewood TV and film studios has proposed a new data centre in revised plans for expansion of the scheme, a sign of how demand for studio space has shifted in the past year. 

Pinewood Group, which is owned by real estate manager Aermont Capital, received planning permission for a 1.4M SF expansion of the famous film studio to the west of London in 2023. That would have solely comprised TV and film production space. 

But in revised plans revealed at a public consultation last week, Pinewood said that only around 300K SF of the expansion would be made up of studio and production space, with the remaining 1.1M SF given over to a series of data centre buildings. It did not specify the amount of power that would be available, but it did say that the site had good power connectivity. 

Aermont said the change had been made because of the reduction in new content production across the world. 

“In 2023, the land to the south of Pinewood Studios was granted planning permission for a 1.4M square foot studio development,” Pinewood said in a statement announcing the public consultation. “Since there has been a reduction in global film and high-end television production which has triggered a review of our existing planning consent.”

Pinewood South is situated within one of the UK’s most important data centre submarkets, known as an availability zone. This availability zone includes data centre cloud operators such as Cyrus One, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and NTT.

Under Aermont’s ownership, the value of Pinewood Group, which also includes another studio at nearby Shepperton and facilities in Toronto, has grown massively. That is because companies like Netflix, Amazon and Disney signed long leases with the company to guarantee space to make new programmes and films to feed their streaming services. 

But growth has slowed for these companies, and they are making fewer programmes and cutting back on new space. 

As revealed by Bisnow, several other owners of studio schemes in the UK have hit pause on film studio developments, including Blackstone and Hudson Pacific at a site north of London. 

Last month, Wycombe Film Studios, located further west than Pinewood, also said it planned to build a data centre on land earmarked for studio space, Data Center Dynamics reported. 

Aermont bought Spanish data centre platforms Nabiax in November last year and has said it wants to expand further in the data centre sector.