UK’s IXcellerate starts work on new $500m Moscow data centre campus

Local reports claim another campus in Northern Moscow is on on the cards

London-based data centre operator IXcellerate has begun building what it claimed is Europe’s largest data centre campus after securing a location in the South of Moscow.

When compete Moscow South, located on a 34-acre plot of land previously occupied by a brewery, will comprise several data centres capable of supporting 200MW of IT power with space for 20,000 racks.

IXcellerate has also secured a contract to build another data centre campus in Northern Moscow, Reuters quoted local publicaiton Kommersant as claiming. It is typically difficult to unearth precise figures about a nation’s total IT capacity, but according to the local paper Russia’s rack capacity stood at 50,000 in 2020.

Construction has begun on the first of these data centres, Moscow Five (MOS5), which will be located in an existing 26,000 sq m building at the former brewery.

The UK data centre operator said in a press release that the data centre is set for commissioning in the second half of this year, with IXcellerate CEO Guy Willner telling DCD the facility will start with 4MW of capacity in Q3 before 8MW of addtional load is added in Q4 or early 2022.

IXcellerate currently operatates Moscow One, opened in 2012 and Moscow Two, launched in 2019.

“We are proud to announce the largest expansion step in IXcellerate history – it underlines our commitment to helping the next generation of Russia’s tech entrepreneurs alongside the country’s accelerating public sector digitalization,” Willner said.

“We believe this next step in our growth will allow both enterprises and federal bodies to further harness technology to help create a greener future,” he added.

“In tandem with sustainability, data sovereignty is a major issue across the planet and our datacentres allow companies to fully comply with privacy and localization laws whilst also providing the fastest, lowest latency access possible to Russia’s over 100 million Internet users.”