Take-up of colocation space peaked at a record 35.5MW in Q2 2016 across the four major markets of London, Frankfurt, Amsterdam and Paris, according to global real estate advisor, CBRE.
Driving this impressive activity were strong performances in three key hubs. The Paris market excelled with 7.4MW of take-up over the quarter. Whilst this figure is lower than that seen in London and Frankfurt, it represents greater take-up in the French capital than in 2014 and 2015 combined. London set a record for quarterly performance, with 15.5MW of IT power transacted, whilst Frankfurt reached 10.8MW.
Take-up in Paris was driven principally by Data4 Group, which sold more than 6MW of colocation space in Q2 2016 at its Marcoussis campus. Given France’s two-year downturn in performance, this is a significant turnaround. In line with CBRE’s 2015 prediction, the Paris market has returned to strength and is primed to benefit from the wave of demand from cloud service providers deploying IT infrastructure throughout the major hubs in Europe.
In London, Gyron benefitted from strong demand for space at its new campus facility in Hemel Hempstead and in Frankfurt e-shelter continued to see strong interest. Incidentally, these two companies are both owned by Japan’s NTT, highlighting their strength in the market.
Andrew Jay, Executive Director in the Data Centre Solutions team at CBRE commented:
“It’s encouraging that in a quarter which ended with the UK referendum, the colocation market had its strongest ever performance from the four major markets in Europe. Two key factors aligned to produce such a remarkable quarter. We saw strong demand from corporate and enterprise clients as well as cloud service providers. Furthermore a significant amount of space was pre-let, and contributed to our statistics, as individual buildings or phases became operational in Q2 2016.
We have seen much positivity with regards to cloud service providers over the past two years but an additional injection from institutional tenants, including the government and insurance sectors, has ensured it has been our best ever quarter. “
