VIRTUS embarks on major European construction programme

VIRTUS Data Centres (VIRTUS), a growing data centre provider, has begun a major construction undertaking with the simultaneous construction of five additional data centres across its London sites.

This expansion is said to meet ever-growing customer demand for flexible and well-connected colocation space at scale in London.

During the next two years, VIRTUS - backed by global heavyweight ST Telemedia Global Data Centres (STT GDC) - is committing over £500m to the launch of the five new data centres in the London market, and the completion of its existing four live sites in Slough, Hayes and Enfield.

The five new sites, which go live in 2019 and 2020, will add 76MW to VIRTUS’ London portfolio, doubling the total portfolio size to 145MW.

Neil Cresswell, CEO of VIRTUS Data Centres, said: “VIRTUS and our global platform partners, ST Telemedia Global Data Centres and GDS are leading the market in providing our customers flexible, high quality colocation at scale.

“Our enterprise and cloud customers have capacity and speed to market challenges in key markets like London.

“Our ability to deliver large amounts of capacity, faster and at a lower cost than other operators is solving these issues for them. We believe this scale and speed are two key factors which led VIRTUS to achieve over 50 per cent market share in London in 2018.

It’s critical that we continue building data centres near existing footprints in a campus format, with huge scale and on dense existing fibre routes, to help serve our customers better in this fast-growing market.“

VIRTUS is launching three new sites in the Slough Campus: LONDON3; LONDON9; and LONDON10, delivering 36MW between them to add to its LONDON4 data centre.

This will bring the total VIRTUS Slough Campus to 63MW, the largest on the Slough Estate.

LONDON3, which completed its fit out in December 2018, is already more than 70 per cent contracted. LONDON9 and LONDON10 will go live in 2019 and 2020 and have anchor tenants already contracted.

When complete, the Stockley Park campus will deliver 80MW of power across four data centres which total 32,000 sq m of IT space connected by fibre cables from all of the ‘leading’ fibre owners and operators.

Bruno Lopez, group CEO of ST Telemedia Global Data Centres, added: “As one of the leading financial capitals of the world and a major hub for business activities in Europe, the UK data centre market has been growing at a robust pace over the last few years.

“VIRTUS’ ability to add capacity on a large scale in the UK is part of STT GDC’s continuing investment to best serve the digital infrastructure needs of customers and provide them with the flexibility and scalability required for their business plans.

“We are confident that we will be able to help VIRTUS build on the success of its UK operations and continue to offer one of the leading and fastest-growing data centre platforms in the country.”

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