Property investor Segro has been granted planning permission to build three data centers in Slough, west of London.
Slough Borough Council has given the company the green light to demolish six buildings on Bath Road, adjacent to the Slough Trading Estate, to make way for two data centers, while it has also gained permission to develop a site at nearby Iver.
New data centers at Slough Trading Estate
Segro purchased the Bath Road land, which formerly housed a shopping center, last year for £120.25 million (~$145m) with the aim of turning it into a data center campus.
The new data centers on the land will be 324,316 sq ft (30,130 sqm) and 534,966 sq ft (49,700 sqm). Technical specifications and time frames for construction have not been published.
Planners gave the scheme the go-ahead, noting the site’s proximity to other similar facilities. The data centers will be visible from nearby Windsor Castle, but planning officer Martin Cowie said the proposed designs did not raise concerns.
In comments reported by the Maidenhead Advertiser, Cowie told the meeting: “The general intention has been that [the data centers] don’t dominate the wider townscape and the heights have been informed by a substantial amount of townscape studying in terms of key views, heritage assets including those at Windsor Castle, and been deliberately designed that the…data centers sit comfortably within the general commercial character of the area.”
Segro’s Iver scheme gets the go-ahead
Meanwhile, Segro has been given permission to get started on a major data center project in Iver, Buckinghamshire.
First announced in 2022, the Segro Iver data center campus at Thorney Road Business Park will comprise three buildings offering 990,000 sq ft (92,000 sqm) of space. Planning documents show that the first building on the site, DC1, will be 19.5m high, with three stories of data halls, and a further 5.5m height of cooling equipment on its roof.
The project is likely to take two years to complete and will cost over £350 million ($447m).
Segro is aiming to develop up to 24 new data centers across the UK and Europe after raising £900 million ($1.1 billion) in a share issue earlier this year.
It has made a series of investments in Slough, the UK’s largest data center market, and in December 2022, it paid £425 million ($570m) for an office park opposite the Slough Trading Center, which it already owned at the time, and merged the two to develop a cluster of data centers.
In January 2022, Global Technical Realty broke ground on a 40.5MW data center at Slough Trading Estate, leasing the space from Segro.
Other developments in Slough include a project by Equinix to develop a former paint factory into a data center. Other providers including Virtus, Kao, CyrusOne, and Iron Mountain also operate facilities in the area.
