Europe’s Largest Data Center Campus to Change Ownership

Next Generation Data. Image via Google Street View

Vantage Data Centers, of Denver, has agreed to acquire Next Generation Data from InfraVia Capital Partners, of Paris, and two of NGD’s founders. Financials on the deal were not disclosed.

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Located in Marshfield, Wales, less than 10 miles from Cardiff, NGD is a purpose-built, carrier-neutral, highly secure, 750,000-square-foot Tier III facility and Europe’s largest data center campus. It features a 180 MVA power supply direct from the U.K.’s National Supergrid and sourced from 100 percent renewable energy, as well as a variety of on-site, high-speed and low-latency carrier interconnects.

The 50-acre campus has an existing 72MW facility and 108MW of expansion capacity. NGD Cloud Gateway provides multiple access services, including Express Route and Connect, and NGD recently became a new hosting facility for LINX (London Internet Exchange) Wales.

InfraVia had acquired a majority stake in NGD for roughly £100 million (currently about $124 million) in equity in July 2016, according to a published report at the time. NGD founders Simon Taylor and Nick Razey retained significant stakes.

The transaction will be funded with equity commitments from Digital Colony Partners and other investors in Vantage, as well as acquisition debt financing. It’s expected to close in the third quarter.

In a prepared statement, Vantage president/CEO Sureel Choksi extolled the facility’s very low network latency to London, low power costs, excellent fiber connectivity and unusually scalable campus. Once the acquisition closes, NGD CEO Justin Jenkins will join Vantage as president of Vantage U.K.

Wide and wise investments

On closing, Wales will mark Vantage’s sixth strategic market in Europe. In February, the company announced its acquisition of Luxembourg-based data center developer Etix Everywhere, whose portfolio includes a 55MW hyperscale data center under construction near Frankfurt.

In separate deals, Vantage Europe purchased sites on which to develop hyperscale data center campuses in Berlin, Milan, Warsaw and Zurich. The whole package of acquisitions was valued around $2 billion.

Vantage has not been expanding only overseas. In January 2019, it bought a 50-acre site outside of Phoenix, with plans to build a campus with three data centers, totaling 160MW and 1 million square feet.

Of Vantage’s new European sites, Frankfurt in particular seems to be a promising data center market, according to a recent Data Center Global Market Comparison from Cushman & Wakefield. Frankfurt ranked well for being in availability zones for the three major cloud platforms: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. The city was also ranked favorably for Germany’s political stability.