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London’s data centre boom has stepped up to a new level with plans for three huge schemes worth more than £10 billion revealed in a single week. The projects are all in and around the capital where they are best placed to service the vast data needs of the City, tech companies, and the broader London economy. The schemes are mainly large projects aimed at hyperscale data centre occupiers, which support the growing use of AI. In the first of the trio of huge deals Colt Data Centre Services said this week that it received planning consent from Hillingdon council to expand its Hayes Digital Park campus in west London. The plans include three new hyperscale data centres and an innovation hub. The £2.5 billion project will add 97 megawatts to the available information technology power at the Hayes Digital Park, taking the total capacity to 160 MW, according to a report by business news website Bisnow. The site replaces the neglected Hayes Bridge Retail Park. Once operational, the new Colt Data Centre Services site will create 500 permanent jobs. Construction is expected to start in the middle of next year, 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. Power contracts for this development have been secured with National Grid and a high voltage supply is due to be delivered by October 2027. In a second deal Ark Data Centres said it has started a public consultation on a £2 billion data centre near Watford. The site, at a former Mercure hotel, could reportedly host up to six two-to-three-story data centers on a campus with up to 200 MW of power, according to Data Centre Dynamics. The company is hoping to start work on the site in 2026 and complete what could become Europe’s largest data centre campus in 2029. The company said: “The proposed development will be a best-in-class campus able to deploy a full suite of government, enterprise, cloud, and AI workloads across Ark's diverse customer base, which includes many of the most well-known and valuable tech companies in the world.” In the third major scheme unveiled last week specialist developer and operator Equinix said it will build a £3.9 billion data centre campus with 250 of power. The project in on an 85-acre site near the M25 South Mimms in Hertfordshire. Equinix purchased the project known as DC01UK from a joint venture between renewable energy infra builder Chiltern Green Energy and property developer Griggs Homes, which the pair established in 2022 to oversee it. Equinix runs colocation schemes, which are leased out to multiple data centre users.
