UK data center operator Kao Data has appointed Spencer Lamb as its CEO.

Lamb spent the last six years as the company's chief commercial officer, and previously held positions at Verne, Infinity, and Cable & Wireless.

"I've been with Kao Data for six years now, and we've had quite a few changes of CEO during my tenure at the business," Lamb told DCD, referencing the departure of Lee Myall in 2024 and then the one-year stint of Doug Loewe up until June 2025. In the interim, the position has been held by chairman David Bloom.

"The difference this time is that I've been working very closely with [Bloom] during that, doing not just the commercial stuff, but the development, the design, delivery, and also operations."

The company operates a number of facilities across sites in Harlow, Slough, Northolt, and Greater Manchester, and recently announced plans for a data center in Park Royal, West London. "We are just focusing on the UK at the moment," Lamb said, revealing that previous plans for a European expansion under Loewe had been put on ice.

Despite being one of the largest locations in the world for data center developments, the UK has struggled to attract mega-projects for AI development, with Kao looking to continue to seek more modest projects at the megawatt scale.

The UK government has proposed AI growth zones to attract larger projects, but has seen challenges - including OpenAI pulling out of the country, dropping a multi-billion pound data center project.

"Over the last few months, as they've engaged with the data center market, and we've explained to them that with energy costs four times the value of what they are today, and with AI copyright, we haven't got a hope in hell of getting any AI training in the UK," Lamb said.

"OpenAI couldn't be more blunt. They told us that they have told their staff categorically: Ideally, don't train in the EU, but whatever you do, do not train anything in the UK."

He added, "The government has listened to that, and now they've decided that that 10 to 12 gigawatts of data center capacity and demand will just come from inferencing. That's interesting."

Despite the challenges, Lamb is bullish about Kao's prospects. "We're not just going to become a hyperscaler provider, we're really keen to mix it up with the neocloud industry, we're really keen to see how we can deploy genuine AI factories," he said.

"So these really dense data center configurations, which are going to look very different to what we've all got used to building over the last 10-15 years, and I think that's going to be fascinating to see."