Europe has seen the size of its colocation market increase by a quarter in the past year, according to research published by property consultancy firm CBRE, based on data centers in Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam and Paris.

In the first quarter of 2017, the four major data center hubs saw a 38MW rise in supply, and existing data centers added 26.6MW of IT capacity.

Europe by night
Europe by night – NASA

More data centers built, more data centers used

London accounted for 60 percent of take-up in the past quarter, whereas that of Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Paris put together only amounted to 9MW.

The growth in demand has been mainly attributed to the rise of cloud computing, but CBRE expects that an increase in enterprise activity over the course of the year will contribute to further growth. 

London’s return to the top stands in contrast with the figures from last year, when Amsterdam became the first market ever to see more than 50MW of take-up in one year, having outperformed London for three consecutive years. 

CBRE recently published another report stating that a combination of Britain’s exit from the European Union and the new data compliance rules, which will come into force with the General Data Protection Regulation in 2018, would in fact boost the London market, which is already the largest in Europe by total supply.

And despite slow growth in Paris, 451 Research found that not only does it remain the third largest colocation market in Europe, but that new demand for cloud services from within the country is increasing rapidly.

Overall, last year European take-up reached a record high of 155MW; CBRE data center solutions executive director Andrew Jay predicted that this year will be “another really strong year of at least 100MW.”

He added that the first quarter of this year saw the supply across the four markets reach 996MW, and it is expected that a number of new data centers will be built - mainly in Amsterdam, Frankfurt and London - throughout the year. 

Research published last year showed that the global colocation market is dominated by three major companies (Equinix, Digital Realty and NTT), which maintain their position by acquiring smaller providers. In the case of the European market, Equinix is still among the major players, along with Interxion, Global Switch, Iliad Data Centres and Data4.