Kao Park, the new science and technology campus located on the London-Stansted-Cambridge Corridor, has received planning approval to develop the UK’s largest state-of-the-art campus data centre, KAO Data Campus.
Site demolition is complete and, now planning approval has been received, mobilisation is underway. The construction phase of the development will follow imminently with the data centre scheduled to come on stream in 2017.
KAO Data Campus will comprise four data centres each split into four halls and designed over three floors, totalling around 150,000 sq ft. The campus will have a dedicated 33kV/11kV 43.5MVA sub-station and each data centre hall will be capable of supporting a 2175kW IT load totalling an 8.7MW IT load across each building. The technical capability, hyper-connectivity strategy and secure data resilience of KAO Data Campus makes it ideally placed to support the research and development clusters running between London and Cambridge.
The development master-plan will deliver outstanding sustainability and energy-efficiency credentials including; BREEAM ‘Excellent’. It will also be market leading in its power usage effectiveness (PUE) (<1.2) and water and carbon usage effectiveness (WUE/CUE), as well as having 100% green power available. Technically robust power and cooling technologies will be integrated into the engineering infrastructure and supported by a globally recognisable data centre supply chain.
Paul Finch, chief technical officer, KAO Data Campus said: “KAO Data Campus will provide its customers with, scalable flexibility across an inter-connected campus with the highest levels of availability and resilience ensuring that the park becomes a new centre for discovery and innovation and lives up to its 50 year legacy.”
This site is the first part of the Harlow Enterprise Zone to be delivered and will be the only campus near London to provide occupiers with Grade A office accommodation (215,000 sq ft) and an onsite data centre campus. KAO Park, The Enterprise Zone and London-Stansted-Cambridge corridor have already received strong interest from life science businesses and organisations, such as defence innovation specialist Raytheon UK, and electronics supplier Arrow Electronics as well as Public Health England, which have further established the region as one of scientific discovery.
Kao Park was named in honour of Charles Kao who, along with George Hockham, discovered the technology behind fibre optic cable whilst working for Standard Telephone Laboratories (which later became Nortel in the 1990s). The breakthrough, which won him the 2009 Nobel Prize for Physics, is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.
