Global Switch suffered a small fire at its London data center over the weekend.

The London Fire Brigade (LFB) announced over the weekend that eight fire engines and around 60 firefighters were called to a “small fire” at a commercial building on Nutmeg Lane in Blackwall in the early hours of Saturday (January 24) morning.

A fire incident was reported to the Brigade’s 999 Control officers at 04:52am and “quickly extinguished” by 6.43am.

The fire occurred at Global Switch’s London data center. Local press reports that the incident occurred in the building’s basement.

LFB said the fire is believed to have been accidental and caused by the failure of one of the lead-acid batteries. The fire was limited to a string of lead-acid batteries, and there was no further damage to the building.

DCD understands the batteries were in a room operated by a subcontractor. The room held some 200 batteries. The fire was reportedly put out by a single firefighter with a handheld extinguisher.

There were no reports of any injuries. There was reportedly no disruption to customer services.

The scale of the brigade’s response was seemingly disproportionate to the actual size of the fire due to the fact that the fire was in a high-rise building. Crews had been mobilized from Poplar, Millwall, Plaistow, Stratford, East Ham, and East Greenwich fire stations to the scene.

Global Switch’s Docklands data center has 224MVA of power available and hosts H100 and H200 GPUs for CoreWeave, in what Global Switch claims is Europe’s largest deployment of the Nvidia hardware.

The company operates two sites in the Docklands - London East and London North. It announced plans for a third facility, London South, which will offer 40MW across 27,000 sqm (290,625 sq ft) in 2024. In June of last year, it launched a showcase of liquid cooling technologies at the Docklands site.

Back in 2023, a water leak at Global Switch's Paris facility caused a battery fire that led to all of Google's European operations suffering an outage.

This latest incident is one of two data center fires in the UK over the weekend. A BT/Openreach telephone exchange in Scotland also suffered a fire on Saturday. The cause of the incident is unknown, and an investigation is underway.