EDITOR’S QUESTION
WHAT IS DRIVING THE BOOM IN
EUROPEAN DATA CENTRES?
t is undeniable that
there has been a
dramatic increase
in European data
centre expansion and
ultimately, investment.
The vast majority (92%) of debt and
equity investors surveyed in the following
report, European Data Centre Investment
Outlook: Opportunities and Risks in the
Months Ahead, expect the overall value
of investment into Europe’s data centre
infrastructure to increase over the
next 24 months, according to research
commissioned by DLA Piper. Previous Brexit uncertainty has affected
data centre investment. All respondents
agreed that it had negatively impacted the
data centre infrastructure market since
June 2016, with 56% of equity investors
going as far as to say that the negative
impact has been ‘significant’.
Organisations use data centres for
the remote storage, processing and
distribution of large amounts of data and
are currently estimated to use 3–4% of
world’s power. According to the report,
investors anticipate an investment
increase in data centres of between 10%
and 29% over the next two years. The majority of respondents chose Germany
as the European country that will see the
biggest growth in data centre project
investment over the coming months.
I
Data from Acuris in the report shows that
the first half of 2019 saw a notable rise
in investment – with €1 billion flooding
into the data centres market in H1 alone,
compared with a total of €1.5 billion for
the whole of 2018.
www.intelligentdatacentres.com
In an increasingly interconnected world,
with an ever-expanding need for data
storage facilities, respondents are
expecting rent charges to increase for
data centres with superior technology,
with over a third expecting the increase to
be 10% or more.
Investors also expect the UK to see
some of the biggest investment growth in
the industry, followed by the Netherlands
and France.
We hear from industry experts on how
they predict the European data centre
sector will continue to develop over the
next couple of years and the factors that
are driving the development.
Issue 14
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