Hyperscale cloud giants guzzled over 100MW of colocation capacity in the past 12 months

Cloud providers have stepped up their dominance of European colocation, according to new research

In the past 12 months, hyperscale cloud giants alone have bought over 100MW of colocation capacity in Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam and Paris (FLAP), equating to a capital investment of $800 million (£635 million), according to new research from real estate advisor CBRE.

The four FLAP markets set a new record for Q1 procurement, recording 41MW. Frankfurt fared best, representing almost half of all capacity sold. Paris recorded 10MW of take-up for the second year in a row, the first time it has ever managed to do so.

London had a weak quarter, which CBRE attributed to the city’s reliance on cloud providers who deployed their requirements in the other European markets during the quarter.

The takeup shows no sign of slowing down. CBRE forecasts that 223MW of additional supply will be brought online before 2020, representing 21 percent annual growth.

“European and US developer-operators aggressively seeking to grow their footprint in order to give themselves the best chance of winning the limited number of increasingly large cloud transactions,” CBRE said.

Finally, CBRE predicts M&A and investment to continue at a pace, as highlighted by two recent sales: Switch Datacenters selling its AMS1 facility to Equinix and KPN announcing the sale of its Dutch data centre business, NLDC.

“The major themes driving the European data centre sector, larger customer requirements, bigger data centre developments and heightened levels of M&A, all continue to be driven off the back of what the cloud providers are doing,”  said Mitul Patel, head of EMEA Data Centre Research at CBRE.

“These companies, responsible for 81 percent of demand in Q1 2019, are tightening their grip on the European colocation sector, shaping entire markets as they go about their business. Companies right across the supply chain are redefining whole business models to serve this one client-base,” he added.

The $34 billion (£26 billion) colocation market is currently experiencing booming demand as major cloud providers seek to move closer to major business districts.