Details of expansion scheme revealed
Kao Data is pressing ahead with plans to expand its data center campus in Harlow, UK, having submitted detailed blueprints for two new buildings.
The company has filed a Local Development Order (LDO) compliance application to Harlow District Council to check that the development complies with planning regulations.
An LDO is a planning instrument that local authorities can use to speed up the planning process by granting permission for certain types of development in defined areas, without the need for a full planning application.
The district council has already agreed in principle that a data center can be developed on the land, which is owned by Powerrapid Ltd, and the latest application delivers more details of the proposed buildings.
Kao is seeking to build two data centers, known as KLON7 and KLON8, and a substation with ancillary office accommodation and associated site infrastructure and facilities, including internal access roads, plant, landscaping works, drainage features, parking, and engineering operations.
KLON7 will be 24,275 sqm (261,295 sq ft) in size, with KLON8 being 11,655 sqm (125,455 sq ft). Technical specifications for the data centers have not been shared.
The plot in question has previously been the subject of some controversy, with Harlow District Council having attempted to buy it from Powerrapid to form part of an expansion for the nearby Harlow Science Park. However, in 2023, Powerrapid launched a successful legal challenge against a compulsory purchase order issued by the council for the land, meaning it can now be developed as a data center.
Kao was launched in 2015, and its Harlow campus opened in 2018; The 61,000 sqm (656,600 sq ft) site was originally set to host four 10MW buildings.
The Harlow campus currently has two operational data centers - KLON-01 and 02 – each offering 10MW. Work began on the site’s second data center in March 2022 and was completed in late 2023. Nvidia’s Cambridge-1 supercomputer sits within Kao’s original Harlow facility.
Earlier this year, it announced KLON-03, a new 17.6MW facility at the campus.
The company is named after Sir Charles Kao, who won a Nobel Prize for physics for his creation of optical fiber cables while working at the Standard Telephone Laboratories (STL) research center in Harlow. The labs were located on the land that now hosts the data centers.
Kao is owned by Infratil, Legal & General, and Goldacre. The company also operates a data center in Slough, a former Barclays data center in Northolt, and is developing a new campus in Manchester.
Source: DCD
