CBRE: London Leads Way As European Data Centre Colocation Rises

CBRE says Europe’s strong 2016 performance in the data centre colocation market has continued at the start of this year as businesses look to reap the benefits of cloud computing.

The four core European hubs of London, Frankfurt, Amsterdam and Paris all enjoyed a successful first quarter in 2017, with real estate advisor CBRE reporting 26.6 mega watts (MW) of take-up and 38MW of new supply.

London was responsible for 60 percent of the European total (17.5MW) the cities second-largest quarterly total ever thanks to significant activity by local hyperscale cloud providers.

Up and up

In contrast, Amsterdam recorded 3.5MW of take-up, followed by Frankfurt (3.2MW) and Paris (2.3MW).

“We predicted a strong 2017 in the European markets and Q1 has certainly delivered for us,” said Andrew Jay, executive director of data centre solutions at CBRE. “Given the momentum built up in 2016 we weren’t surprised to see a strong start to the year. The key question is whether 2017 will surpass last year’s record breaking 155MW.

“Our view is that we will have another really strong year of at least 100MW which is astonishing considering that the record take-up prior to 2016 was 78MW.”

Despite the successful first quarter, colocation providers will be hard pushed to beat last year’s performance. 2017 saw a record amount of activity across Europe, with CBRE reporting 155MW of take-up to double the previous annual record.

Factors such as continued consolidation in the data centre space and growing enterprise demand for cloud services contributed to this “unprecedented” activity, a trend which is expected to gather pace throughout 2017.

The global colocation market is predicted to reach $33.2 billion (£23bn) by 2018 and data centre operators have been scrambling to scale their operations of late.

Equinix, for example, recently purchased IO UK’s data centre operating business in Slough and VIRTUS is planning to build a fourth facility in London to meet local demands.

Quiz: The world of cloud in 2017