London was responsible for 17.5MW of take-up, 60% of the European total. The market saw significant further activity by the hyperscale cloud players, which resulted in London’s second-largest quarterly total on record. In contrast Amsterdam (3.5MW), Frankfurt (3.2MW) and Paris (2.3MW) were relatively quiet in the first quarter.
Continued activity from cloud service providers has again been the bed rock of a strong first quarter. However, an expected increase in activity from corporate and enterprise occupiers as the year goes on will provide more balance to take-up.
Andrew Jay, Executive Director, Data Centre Solutions, at CBRE commented:
“We predicted a strong 2017 in the European markets and Q1 has certainly delivered for us. Given the momentum built up in 2016 we weren’t surprised to see a strong start to the year. The key question is whether 2017 will surpass last year’s record breaking 155MW. Our view is that we will have another really strong year of at least 100MW which is astonishing considering that the record take-up prior to 2016 was 78MW.
“Q1 came very close to reaching a milestone of 1000MW of supply across the four markets; ending the quarter on 996MW. We expect a substantial amount of further new supply to come on during the course of the year, including new entrants in Amsterdam, Frankfurt and London.”