Huge Expansion for Telehouse London Hub

Telehouse Europe today announced a huge expansion of its London data center complex in the Docklands, one of the world's busiest network traffic hubs. Telehouse will invest £80 million (about $162 million) in a new eight-story, 130,000 square foot colocation facility, a huge increase in the size of its London Docklands data center facilities.

The Docklands project in part of a global expansion of Telehouse facilities to meet surging demand for data center space from its clients in the financial and telecom indsustries. Telehouse will invest in an additional 160,000 square feet of new facilities near Paris and open a new 16,000 square foot data center in Singapore, a new market for the company. Telehouse recently opened a datacenter in Beijing, China and already operates three facilities in the New York area, and one apiece in Los Angeles and Hong Kong.

While no additional projects are planned in the US, Telehouse said that over the long-term it intends to expand across nine countries in South East Asia, Eastern Europe and emerging markets, giving it more than 1 million square feet of premium data center space by 2010.

Telehouse has two existing data centers in the Docklands, with 300,000 square feet of data centre space housing more than 700 telecoms and colocation service providers. The center is such a critical connectivity hub that it was reportedly the focus of a terrorist plot to disrupt Internet traffic in the United Kingdom. Analysts debated the credibility of those reports, as well as how UK communciations would fare if the Docklands site went offline.

But no one disputes the pressing need for additional data center space in London, historically one of the world's tightest markets for data center supply. Telehouse will begin construction later this year and hopes to bring the new facilities online in early 2010, ramping to meet the growing demands of City-based financial institutions and the nearby London 2012 Olympics.

The new Telehouse South (complementing the current East and North buildings) is currently in the design phase and will feature the latest communications, monitoring and resilient power and cooling technologies, as well as adopt latest environmental standards and best practice.

"Having quality facilities in close proximity to the heart of London is very important to our customers," said Tokuji Mitsui, managing director of Telehouse Europe. "Telehouse is fortunate in having quality space and infrastructure available on our existing site in London Docklands, giving us a competitive advantage over others forced to locate outside the M25."

Recent data center construction projects in London have focused outside the city center, where space and power are more readily available. The Telehouse announcement did not specifically address how much power the new facility would require, or the availability from local utilities.