Research just released by GVA Connect, the data centre specialist division of property agent GVA, showed UK take-up of data centre space amounted to 830,000 square feet (gross retail area) in calendar year 2013.
“This represented an 18% jump in data centre space take-up over the previous year,” said GVA Connect director Charles Carden, adding that the company expected take-up to remain at this level during 2014.
Confirming London’s position as a leading international data centre hub, Carden revealed over three quarters of the 2013 data centre take-up was within the so-called London Synchronous Locations (locations which deliver round-trip latency of under three milliseconds). The second most popular location was Manchester with the remainder of take-up spread across the UK.
Said Carden, ‘Not only does this research indicate a very healthy increase in data centre activity, the average power requirement – at over 500kw – demonstrates that the majority of these new projects are of a very significant size.
GVA Connect sees these figures as a very sound indicator of continued occupier confidence declaring that this follows-on from the steep rise in both the number and size of enquiries they reported in Q4/13.
“We continue to see an increase in serious enquiries from US operators for space in both UK and right across EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa),” said Carden.
Availability of data centre space in the London Zone is illustrated by new data centre space such as Gateway in London’s West Thurrock. This has the ability to deliver up to 86,000 square feet of data halls, 50MVA of diverse power, excellent connectivity and 2.0ms round trip latency to the City of London. Similar opportunities currently exist at both London’s Bracknell and Perivale data centres which, like Gateway are available as Shell and Core, Powered Shell or can be delivered as Fully Fitted data centres to specific customer requirements.
Also currently available are self-contained opportunities within existing established London region data centres such as 30,000 to 50,000 sqft of space at Heathrow in West London with 41MVA of power and 50,000 sqft at Croydon in South London with dual 10MVA potential.
In the regions too there are data centre opportunities such as the Portal Data Centre in Nottingham with excellent connectivity, existing clients on lease plus planning consents to expand to 70,000 sqft of gross space with power expandable to over 10MVA via diverse feeds.
GVA Connect also reports a further rising trend in interest for data centre space from corporate users, cloud service providers and media-related businesses – indicating a relaxation in IT budgets as we move into 2014.
Carden added, “We anticipate enquiry and activity levels remaining steady at this higher level throughout 2014 with transactional activity driven by USA operators in Q3/14 and Q4/14.”