“Equinix has announced a further £90 million investment in a new data centre to service growing demand for digital financial services in the City of London, bringing their total UK investment to £295 million this financial year – a vote of confidence in its future as the world’s premier financial hub,” said May speaking at the Confederation of British Industries annual conference today.
The new international business exchange (IBX) site announcement by the global interconnection and data centre company is part of a fleet of new and expanded facilities on Equinix’s London Slough campus, and is due to open in early 2019.
Equinix has over 200 sites in 52 markets across the world, enabling companies to conduct business internationally and compete in the global digital economy. This new infrastructure will bring the company’s UK portfolio to 12 IBXs and supports increasing demand for capacity to handle growing volumes of data, including increasing traffic coming out of the City of London.
“London is one of the most important connection points in the world and this is expected to continue post-Brexit as the city continues to play a crucial role in powering the global digital economy. Our decision to invest again in the UK’s digital infrastructure reflects our confidence that London will remain a leader in the global digital economy, regardless of the outcome of the negotiations over the UK’s departure from the European Union,” added Russell Poole, UK managing director UK of Equinix.
“LD7 will be one of the most technologically advanced colocation data centres in the world and will be a major addition to our thriving London Slough campus. This latest data centre will also act as a sustainability benchmark for future data centres – something we are very passionate about.”
The new LD7 data centre will enable customers to interconnect securely with 1,000+ businesses in London including leading capital markets participants, insurers and electronic payments firms, as well as 200+ network service providers and 275+ cloud and IT service providers. LD7 will add 1,750 cabinets in its initial phase and expand to 2,650 cabinets at full build.
LD7 will also provide direct, secure and dynamic software-defined interconnection through the Equinix Cloud Exchange Fabric to over 1,300 businesses including the largest CSPs. Customers can take advantage of scalability, agility and connectivity over a self-service portal or API and, through a single port, can discover and reach anyone at Equinix on demand, locally or across metros.
Earlier this year the company also announced that it would expand its LD4 data centre due to continued growth of the world’s largest multi-asset class electronic trading ecosystem, which consists of a robust collection of interconnected execution venues, trading platforms, market data vendors, service providers, buy-side firms, and sell-side firms.
The high-performance data centre is part of £295 million-worth of investment throughout 2018/19 announced at Equinix’s London Slough campus to meet demand from UK businesses undergoing digital transformation. This also includes £82 million expanding its LD10 data centre, £94 million expanding its LD9 facility, and the £29 million expansion plan at its LD4 data centre.
The investment in expansions at LD9 and LD10 include the development of dedicated space for hyperscale infrastructure to meet demand from cloud service provider customers.
With over 90 network service providers and access to a range of transatlantic cables, the London Slough campus is one of the busiest network nodes in the UK, and offers latency in the region of 30 milliseconds to New York and 4 milliseconds to Frankfurt, making it an ideal high-performance hub for electronic trading, as well as cloud and content service provision.
Including current expansion projects, Equinix will have invested over £940 million to build and expand its presence in the London metro area. The campus processes a quarter of all of Europe’s equity trading, and connects the City of London with the rest of the world.
