On 1 August 2024, industrial property developer Panattoni Development announced its plans to begin developing data centres in North America, driven by increased demand following a recent surge in the use of AI technology.
Adam Kramer, former CEO of carbon emissions management platform nZero, has been hired by Panattoni as a partner to lead the construction and operation of data centres across North America.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Panattoni plans to develop a gigawatt of data centre capacity over the next five years, equivalent to powering around 876,000 homes.
Doug Roberts, president of Panattoni’s North American development group, said: “You want to be where the customer is, and right now the customer wants to be in the data centre world.”
Roberts told The Wall Street Journal that Panattoni intends to build new data centres on its existing own land as well as through the purchasing of new properties. The buildings will reportedly range in size from 100 megawatts to 500 megawatts of capacity.
According to a report from CBRE, the need for data centre space to support AI-specific requirements is pushing Europe’s largest colocation data centres to unprecedented heights.
The CBRE report, entitled “Global data centre trend report 2024”, also revealed that ‘despite power supply issues, North American data centre inventory grew by 24.4% year-over-year in Q1 2024, adding 807.5 megawatts across Northern Virginia, Chicago, Dallas and Silicon Valley’.
In addition to these regions, the report identified Northern Indiana and Boise, Idaho as emerging markets for data centres in North America. It also noted that ‘North American data centre vacancy rates hit new lows across major markets’.
In the UK, supporting the development of new data centres has been identified as a priority for the new government. In its election manifesto, the Labour Party pledged to ‘ensure our industrial strategy supports the development of the AI sector [and] removes planning barriers to new data centres’.
Former chancellor Jeremy Hunt pointed towards recent investment in data centres from companies such as Microsoft and Google as examples of foreign investment in the UK in his Spring Budget announcement on 6 March 2024.
In January 2024, it was announced that construction had begun on a new US$1 billion Google data centre in Hertfordshire.
Furthermore, Microsoft began construction of a new data centre in West London at the beginning of 2024, outlining a timeline of 24 months to completion. Then in February 2024, the company announced proposals to develop a new data centre campus on the site of a decommissioned power station in Eggborough, North Yorkshire.
As of December 2023, there are reportedly around 11,000 data centre locations worldwide.
As technology such as AI becomes more and more important to businesses and individuals around the world, the demand for data centres is set to keep growing, so it will be important to ensure that their supply can keep up with this demand.
