L&G And Noé Group Back Huge New London Data Centre That Could Heat Nearby Homes

Investment manager Legal & General and veteran private investor Noé Group are backing the development of what would be one of the largest data centres in London as the digital real estate sector continues to expand. 

L&G has teamed up with specialist data centre investor Goldacre, a sister company of Leo Noé’s Noé Group, to build a data centre in Canning Town, Newham, East London. It will target hyperscale data centre occupiers and provide 77 megawatts of power, making it one of the largest single centres in the country. 

The site will be split across two data centre buildings and an energy centre, Data Centre Dynamics reported, and the scheme will total 651K SF. It is being built on the site of a former metal recycling facility.

Developers said in a planning application they will install a heat recovery room that could warm as many as 13,000 homes at a new housing estate planned nearby. The estate would need a district heating system to make that possible. 

L&G invests in data centres through Legal & General Capital, the division that invests the company’s balance sheet capital in infrastructure and real estate deals. 

In 2019, it invested in a data centre campus being built by Kao Data Centres, the data centre developer set up by Noé Group and a precursor to Goldacre. 

The size of the investment in the Canning Town site has not been disclosed, but given the size of the scheme, it is likely to be in the hundreds of millions.

Newham is becoming a locus of data centre development in London. Nearby to L&G and Goldacre’s scheme, industrial owner and developer GLP has pivoted to build a data centre on a site where it had previously planned a logistics project. It is planning a 692K SF, 210 MW campus.