Fife To Get £100m Data Centre Campus

Permission has been granted for a data centre build in Fife, Scotland that will be home to the largest colo campus in the country.

Set to cost £100m, two cloud hosting facilities at Queensway Park in Glenrothes are set to be finished by the end of 2016.

The company behind the build, Queensway Park data Centres Ltd, is a joint venture between AOC Group and County Properties Group.

Business infrastructure

Robin Presswood, head of economy and planning for the local council said: “This as an important piece of business infrastructure that Fife can offer companies looking for improved business performance through cloud computing and to companies using Big Data to identify new business trends and opportunities, particularly in financial services and the energy industries.”

Queensway said that there are currently only 7 co-location facilities in Scotland in comparison with around 214 throughout the rest of the UK. This equates roughly to 3.62 data centres per million of population in England and Wales against only 1.3 per million in Scotland.

Queensway Park Data Centres Director Alan O’Connor said: “Interest in the Fife facility has been strong and although we are building towards shared or co-location facilities, we are not ruling out the possibility of a single user requirement for either phase.”

The facility will draw power from the adjacent RWE Innogy biomass plant which is the largest built to date in the UK producing up to 65 mega watts of electricity. The majority of the plants fuel comes in the form of wood waste with a very small proportion from sustainable forestry.

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