Highlights

  • The company announced the construction of its second 10MW building at its award-winning Harlow campus.
  • The new data center will enhance the company’s high-performance design angle, directing sustained growth for enterprise, HPC, cloud, and A.I.

Kao Data, the specialist developer and operator of high-performance data centres for enterprise, cloud, High Performance Computing (HPC) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), revealed its plans to bring a second building for its Harlow campus in the U.K. According to the company construction is under progress for its second 10MW facility outside London.

The new facility, KLON-02, builds upon the company’s high performance infrastructure, energy efficiency and sustainability capabilities, thus providing numerous benefits to customers such as reduced carbon footprint and low total cost of ownership (TCO) over the lifecycle.  KLON-02 will have space for almost 1,800 racks across 3,400 sqm of technical space and four data halls. The place will be Nvidia DGX-Ready data center certified and OCP-Ready. It will also offer an SLA-backed PUE of 1.2, use 100% renewable energy, and use hydrotreated vegetable oil in the backup generators.

As with KLON-01, the new carrier-neutral data centre will benefit from access to resilient, low-latency connectivity via major multiple networks, including B.T. Openreach, euNetworks, Jisc/Janet, the London Internet Exchange (LINX), LUMEN and Vorboss.

Kao was launched in 2015, and its Harlow campus was announced in 2018. The facility promises to have around 1,50,000 sq ft (14,000 sqm) of white space, a sum of 35MW of power in four phases. Nvidia’s Cambridge-1 supercomputer resides inside Kao’s Harlow facility.

In October 2021, Infratil Limited stated that it would invest up to £ 120-130 million (USD 163-177 m) in Kao, with a 40 percent stake in the company alongside Legal & General Group and Noé group’s Goldacre.

The company also acquired two data centers in the U.K. with a long-term anchor lease from a financial services firm. Though, the details of the location remained undisclosed. According to Kao, the two facilities total 300,000 square feet. The company had also bought a 16MW data center in Slough in February.

Experts’ view

“The expansion of our Harlow campus is another strategic milestone in Kao Data’s evolution as we continue to scale the business’s high-performance data center offering across the U.K. and Europe,” said Lee Myall, CEO, Kao Data. “With our second 10MW facility in Harlow following the launch of our 16MW data center in Slough closely, Kao Data is bringing advanced colocation capacity at industrial scale to the west and east of London.”

“KLON-02 will build on the award-winning design and build principles of our KLON-01 facility, offering greater efficiencies for our customers’ colocation environments,” added Paul Finch, COO, Kao Data. “It’s exciting to be able to continue to innovate within our construction, engineering, and technical principles, and I am confident our second facility at Harlow will raise the bar again for sustainable, energy-efficient data centers.”