Taking 60% of total with mainland sites relatively quiet
The core European co-location hubs of Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam and Paris had a “strong” start to the year, with 26.6MW of take-up and 38MW of new supply in Q1 2017, according to research from global real estate advisor CBRE.
London was responsible for 17.5MW of take-up, which equates to 60% of the European total. “The market saw significant further activity by the hyper-scale cloud players, which resulted in London’s second-largest quarterly total on record,” said CBRE. In contrast, Amsterdam (3.5MW), Frankfurt (3.2MW) and Paris (2.3MW) were relatively quiet in the first quarter.
While continued activity from cloud service providers has again been the bed-rock of a strong first quarter, CBRE expects an increase in activity from corporate and enterprise occupiers as the year goes on, which will provide a “more balanced take-up”.
Andrew Jay, executive director, data centre solutions at CBRE, said: “We predicted a strong 2017 in the European markets and Q1 has certainly delivered. Given the momentum built up in 2016 we weren’t surprised to see a strong start to the year. The key question is whether 2017 will surpass last year’s record breaking 155MW. Our view is that we will have another really strong year of at least 100MW, which is astonishing considering that the record take-up prior to 2016 was 78MW.”
Q1 came very close to reaching a milestone of 1000MW of supply across the four markets, ending the quarter on 996MW. “We expect a substantial amount of further new supply to come on board during the course of the year, including new entrants in Amsterdam, Frankfurt and London,” said Jay.