31 October 2024

Four US-based companies are set to invest £6.3 billion in UK data centre infrastructure. The planned investments from Cloud HQ, CyrusOne, CoreWeave, and ServiceNow were announced as part of the UK government’s investment summit.

Technology secretary Peter Kyle described the investments as “a vote of confidence in Britain.”

“Data centres power our day-to-day lives and boost innovation in growing sectors like AI. This is why only last month, I took steps to class UK data centres as Critical National Infrastructure giving the industry the ultimate reassurance the UK will always be a safe home for their investment,” said Kyle.

Washington DC-based CloudHQ confirmed at the summit that it is pressing ahead with a £1.9bn data centre campus at Didcot Power Station. DCD has previously reported the company is working with AWS to deliver the project, which was granted planning permission in 2021 and was set, at the time, to offer 84MW capacity.
“We are very excited to deliver a hyper-scale campus in the UK that is truly an extension of Slough due to our private diverse fibre optic route,” said Hossein Fateh, CloudHQ’s founder and CEO. “Our site enables us to build out our campus environment to provide scale and density to meet our customers’ requirements.”

CyrusOne, meanwhile, will spend an additional £2.5 billion in the UK over the coming years. It is planning a 90MW campus in Iver, Buckinghamshire, which would offer 63,000 sqm of data centre facilities in a plot of 16.59 hectares. The site will have 10 data halls across six buildings and include a new on-site substation. Plans, initially drawn up in 2022, were resubmitted earlier this year to ensure they comply with Iver’s local plan.

“The UK government’s recent CNI designation was a strong signal that data centres are of strategic importance to the UK economy,” said Eric Schwartz, president and CEO at CyrusOne. “It has provided CyrusOne with the confidence to continue its expansion in the UK and support the government’s policy ambition to become a centre of excellence for digital services, technology innovation, and AI.”

ServiceNow will spend £1.15bn updating its existing UK data centres over the next five years, while AI data centre provider CoreWeave is investing another £750 million on infrastructure in Britain, on top of the £1 billion it pledged to invest in May.