Digital Realty Expands London Docklands Data Center Campus

Digital Realty Trust this week announced the launch of a fourth data center on its campus in the London Docklands, the city’s big riverfront business center and home to a high concentration of service-provider data centers and network interconnection points.

Called Cloud House, the new data center is the second-largest of the four buildings on the campus, offering about 38,000 square feet of colocation space. The campus, called Digital Docklands, is interconnected by a private fiber network, enabling customers in any of the four buildings to connect to customers in any of the other ones.

Digital Docklands offers access to three internet exchanges as well as private dedicated network links to cloud providers Amazon Web Services and Oracle. Additionally, Digital Realty’s partner Megaport provides virtual connections to any of the 100-plus cloud on-ramps on its list.

Along with the data center launch announcement, San Francisco-based Digital, the world’s second-largest data center provider, announced a study it recently commissioned from the market research firm Development Economics, which assessed the expected economic impact on London from four emerging technology categories: Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, blockchain, and 5G wireless connectivity.

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Collectively, they’re expected to contribute £6.25 to the city’s economy this year, but that contribution will grow to £24.29 billion in 2029, the researchers estimated. The bulk of the contribution this year (£3.09 billion) will come from IoT. But AI will contribute the most to the economy (£10.46 billion) 10 years from now. Of the four, 5G’s contribution is expected to grow the fastest – from £0.13 billion this year to £4.29 billion in 2029.