Q2 2019 witnessed a record take-up of 57MW across the four largest colocation markets in Europe. The FLAP markets of Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam and Paris recorded 98MW at the half-year, 11MW above the previous H1 record according to research from CBRE, the world's leading real estate advisor.
CBRE analysis shows that Frankfurt recorded 44MW of take-up in the first half of the year and is set to beat London’s 2018 full-year total of 77MW, the current highest total for any individual market. Frankfurt’s take-up in H2 will be bolstered by pre-lets to some of the large new facilities set to launch in the market.
London’s subdued start to the year continued, with it seeing the lowest take-up of any of the FLAP markets in the first-half of 2019. CBRE attributes this to the hyperscale cloud companies having procured record capacity in London during 2018, with these companies now selling this capacity before they will need to acquire more.
As the demand for data centre capacity continues to grow, the constraints surrounding the availability of land and power in some areas is driving data centre developer-operators to create new sub-markets within the major FLAP cities. Concerns over space and power were a cause for the municipalities of Amsterdam and Haarlemmermeer to jointly put a temporary halt on the development of new data centres. This will not slow down the rate of growth in the Amsterdam market, but may drive developer-operators to new areas in the city.
Mitul Patel, Head of EMEA Data Centre Research at CBRE commented:
“There is no let-up to the extraordinary levels of activity in the European colocation sector. Take-up records are broken every quarter and hyperscale cloud companies continue to be the epicentre of this. As a consequence, winning hyperscale business is more competitive than ever and companies are competing on a number of criteria, including price. To develop its xScale hyperscale product Equinix has gained funding from Singapore’s Sovereign Wealth Fund, GIC.”
