£1.4 billion data centre in Ealing proposed

CyrusOne’s plan will create 1,200 construction jobs and 650 long-term well-paid jobs

An artist’s impression of the proposed data centre (CyrusOne)

The data centre operator CyrusOne plans to invest £1.4 billion in building a data centre on the site of the former Honey Monster factory in Southall.

The site is south of Southall Train depot and west of the Middlesex Business Centre and has been vacant since 2016. It was earmarked for a major logistics centre but developers and investors pulled out.

CyrusOne is based in Dallas, Texas and operates 55 data centres around the world, including five in London. Data centres house the internet and cloud computing and services such as Amazon, Google, Facebook and artificial intelligence can not function without them.

The investment will create 12 data halls over 62,700 square metres, 4,500 square metres of affordable work space for local businesses, new landscaping and ecological improvements and new canal side leisure facilities.

The proposed site of the data centre (CyrusOne)

Construction will require 1,200 workers while the site will offer 650 permanent jobs with much higher salaries than the previously consented projects.

Emma Fryer, CyrusOne’s director of public policy for Europe, described the company’s business model. “We build the infrastructure, we provide the power, the cooling. Then our customers put in their hardware. They then may serve alternative customers from there,” she told West London Chamber of Commerce’s West London Regeneration Conference.

“It’s a big plot that has been vacant for a long time. It has already had two permitted developments on it, one was residential and one was a logistics warehouse and neither have gone ahead due to viability. This is a very different kind of development. It’s a very large facility and it needs a site of that size. They are colossally expensive to build because they are highly engineered,” Fryer told the conference at the Clayton Hotel in Chiswick.

CyrusOne are keen to emphasise that the data centre will be a landmark building rather than an anonymous grey block. “Traditionally data centres have been hidden on industrial estates. Now that we need them close to demographics, we are starting to see them in urban residential areas and semi-rural areas, so we need to do something different with the design. Usually they are quite anonymous but here we want to create a landmark building,” Fryer said.

CyrusOne states that the data centre will be powered from independent renewable sources.“We are acutely aware of the electricity capacity constraints across west London. We have therefore secured our own power supply from elsewhere, meaning that no additional power constraints will be placed on the local network. Our external power sources are all renewable,” said Fryer.

CyrusOne requested a screening opinion from Ealing Council last month but has yet to request planning approval.

An artist’s impression of the data centre campus (CyrusOne)

.