London: 98MW data center facility planned outside Abbots Langley, Hertfordshire

Greystoke Land Ltd has applied to the Three Rivers District Council to demolish extant structures on a 33-hectare site north of Mansion House Farm through Bedmond Road in Abbots Langley to construct a data center campus. The company intends to construct two data center structures totaling up to 904,170 square feet, as well as ancillary offices, internal machinery and plants, emergency backup generators, and fuel storage. The site would have a 96MW IT burden. Also planned is a 300-square-meter "innovation, training, and education center."

Despite its proximity to the M25, the site is currently undeveloped land within the Metropolitan Green Belt. The corporation intends to construct a 21-hectare country park on a portion of the site, despite the Green Belt's general prohibition on industrial development. The British investment firm Greystroke specializes in land-use planning. According to the company, it collaborates with proprietors, developers, and institutions to secure financing and planning permission. Among its intended projects is the Cherwell Logistics Park.

It is currently unclear who the end customer for this campus is, but it is presumably one of the hyperscale cloud providers. Amazon maintains a presence in a Prologis industrial complex in Hemel Hempstead, where NTT operates multiple data centers. A report in the filings describes the site's proximity to an "existing hyperscale entity at Hemel Hempstead" with which it would partner. In addition, it indicates that the Hemel Hempstead availability zone requires 500MW of capacity.