Kao Data is expanding one of its London campuses with a new data center.
The company this week announced KLON-03; a new, 17.6MW facility located at its Harlow campus, east of the capital city. Timelines for development weren't shared.
The facility will offer direct-to-chip liquid cooling alongside traditional air-cooling. Each suite will include hybrid-cooled, hot aisle containment (HAC) systems, which can accommodate densities up to 130kW.
“This year marks ten years’ since our vision for the Harlow campus was first incepted, and I’m delighted that our concept continues to be vindicated, with Harlow firmly established as the UK’s preeminent destination for HPC, AI cloud, and GPU-supported deployments,” said David Bloom, founder and chairman, Kao Data. “KLON-03 will set a new bar for our industrial-scale data center platform, and in line with the government's AI Opportunities Action Plan, will provide one of the country’s largest footprints of liquid-cooled data center capacity.”
Kao was launched in 2015, and its Harlow campus opened in 2018; The 61,000 sqm (656,600 sq ft) site was originally set to host four 10MW buildings.
The Harlow campus currently has two operational data centers - KLON-01 and 02 – each offering 10MW. Work began on the site’s second data center in March 2022 and was completed in late 2023. Nvidia’s Cambridge-1 supercomputer sits within Kao’s original Harlow facility.
The site and company are named after Sir Charles Kao, who won a Nobel Prize for physics for his creation of optical fiber cables while working at the Kao site 50 years ago when it was a Standard Telephone Laboratories (STL) research center.
Kao is owned by Infratil, Legal & General, and Goldacre. The company also operates a data center in Slough, a former Barclays data center in Northolt, and is developing a new campus in Manchester.
