Data center vendor Equinix will invest $79 million to set up a new data center in its London Slough campus to address demand from customers in the financial services, content, cloud and enterprise segments.
Equinix said the new LD6 data center will provide approximately 8,000 square meters (86,000 square feet; 2,770 cabinet equivalents) capacity.
The first phase is scheduled to open in the first half of 2015 and will provide initial capacity of 1,385 cabinets.
Additionally, Equinix has invested $37 million in the acquisition of its existing LD4 and LD5 campus buildings and concurrently entered into long-term ground leases for the entire LD4, LD5 and LD6 campus with SEGRO.
This acquisition gives Equinix effective 50-year control of one of the UK’s largest, fastest-growing and most network-dense data center campuses, supporting customer continuity and future expansion.
Once LD6 is complete, the Equinix London Slough campus will provide over 36,000 square meters (388,000 square feet) of net premium colocation space interconnected by more than 1,000 diverse dark fiber links – increasing scale and resilience.
With over 90 network service providers and access to a range of transatlantic cables, the London Slough campus offers latency in the region of 30 milliseconds to New York and 4 milliseconds to Frankfurt.
The campus currently houses over 170 financial services businesses – and has the largest array of trading venues across multiple asset classes in Europe – which collectively account for 25 percent of the total European equities trade count.
Russell Poole, managing director, Equinix UK, said: “The facility will be the most advanced data center in the UK. We are committed to providing not just continuity but also continuous improvement for our current and future customers.”
