Kao Data to expand datacentre footprint by opening 16MW facility in Slough

Colocation provider Kao Data is making good on its pledge to draw on its recent £130m funding round to expand its datacentre footprint, with the company confirming that building work on its second location in Slough, Berkshire, is now under way.

The firm said the Slough site will be home to a carrier-neutral facility that will boast 16MW of IT capacity, and will be powered by 100% renewable energy.

“From a sustainability standpoint, the new facility will use an ultra-efficient cooling system, with its backup power generators powered by hydro-treated vegetable oil from the outset, removing fossil fuels in their entirety [from the site],” the company said in a statement.

As previously reported by Computer Weekly, the firm made headlines in July 2021 when it claimed to be the first datacentre operator in the UK to swap out its diesel backup generators in favour of biofuel-powered units.

The Slough site will follow the same high-performance design and operational blueprint as Kao’s original datacentre campus in Harlow, Essex, which is home to the UK’s fastest supercomputer, Cambridge-1, the company confirmed.

As such, the new facility will be designed in keeping with the Open Compute Project’s principles, and is on course to become Nvidia DGX-Ready, as is the case with Kao’s Harlow campus.

Similarly, it will be targeting enterprise end-clients with high-performance computing-type workloads, as part of Kao Data’s ongoing push to become a specialist provider of colocation capacity to the life sciences community.

 As previously reported by Computer Weekly, news of Kao’s expansion comes several months after the news that it had secured £130m in additional funding from infrastructure investment company Infratil in exchange for a 40% share of the business.

“The launch of our new Slough datacentre offers data-intensive enterprises within the highly sought-after West London Availability Zone the opportunity to benefit from significant new capacity, as well as the advantage of working with Kao Data’s award-winning, sustainable infrastructure and expert technical and operations teams,” said Kao Data CEO Lee Myall.

“With this move, we are excited to be strengthening our datacentre footprint across the UK and establish ourselves within the world’s second-largest datacentre hub. Kao Data has seen tremendous growth over the last 12 months, and the launch of our Slough facility is the next step in our continuing development.”