The markets of Amsterdam and Frankfurt have continued to receive the strongest interest as connectivity sensitive customers feature heavily on demand schedules. Amsterdam now has the highest take up total of all of the major markets with 17.4MW sold this year. This total is already 54% higher than that recorded for all of last year.
Similarly total take up in Frankfurt is now 12.7% above the full year total in 2013 with the amount of customer power sold at 16.6MW this year. The growth in German corporate interest for Cloud services is influencing the scale of data centre take up in 2014. The major Cloud service providers have been actively acquiring space in Germany benefitting from the network rich infrastructure while alleviating any concern over data privacy in the process.
The highest take up of the third quarter was recorded in London, Europe’s largest market. A total of 7.2MW was sold during the period, the highest total of the year. By historic standards 2014 has been characterised by slower letting activity in the UK capital, with few larger contracts being awarded. However, based on the third quarter results the considerable pipeline of customer requirements appears finally to be translating into completed transactions.
Andrew Jay, Executive Director, EMEA Data Centre Solutions at CBRE, commented: “With the most active data centre customers giving preference to data proximity and latency it is unsurprising to see that demand in the connectivity hubs of Europe continues to flourish. European expansion by the global infrastructure companies has played an important contribution to new market demand which, in some cases, has resulted in large scale acquisitions that have bolstered take up this year.
“A change in focus by enterprise end users toward preparing their future IT requirements is notable and our results evidence that this is yielding new business for colocation providers. The global business environment has become increasingly competitive and as such end user organisations are continuing to seek ways to differentiate. Modernising customer experiences and improving efficiency has become prioritised and this is creating new paths to an outsourced IT solution.”