£1.5bn London Data Centre Will Open Its Doors Next May

NTT’s £1.5bn data centre project in Dagenham, East London is set to go live next May, with installers currently deploying the facility’s backup power.

The value of the project is what the local council has valued it at, and includes the infrastructure and other services that the council is putting into the regeneration of the area around the building. It is hoping that a new digital ecosystem, leading to more jobs, springs up in the area to take advantage of the connectivity that is being created.

The facility received planning approval in October 2018 and groundwork started at the end of the year. The new campus will be known as London 1 and will be capable of providing up to 260,000 square feet of space with a 60MW IT load once fully developed.

London 1 will offer both wholesale and retail colocation and hybrid IT solutions to support customers from a range of market segments including enterprise, hyperscale, SaaS, telcos and cloud services.

Scalable connectivity and fibre infrastructure have been added to the site, which is located near the Dagenham East Underground station and just 15km from London Docklands. It will offer diverse dark fibre routes to London’s key internet exchange sites, enabling international connectivity.

John Eland, chief strategy officer for global data centres at NTT, told the Barking & Dagenham Post newspaper: “This is an enabler and a catalyst. There are no guarantees with this facility, but if you look at historical demographics, it will make Dagenham more attractive to enterprises coming in. It’s a little bit like putting a railway into somewhere, it’s not an overnight transformation.”

There are around 200 people helping to build the facility, which is expected to employ 30 data centre staff when it is completed.

Eland added: “We’ve tried to use local firms where possible. That’s also the case for the future operation of the data centre.” The company is also working with schools and colleges in the area to develop courses that deliver skills related to helping run data centres.

source dataeconomy

Industry: Data Centre / Data Center