Retail data center colocation provider Equinix announced the opening of its 50th data center Tuesday. The facility is located on the outskirts of London and represents the latest step in the Silicon Valley company's aggressive $2-billion expansion campaign that has been ongoing since 2007.

Eric Schwartz, president Equinix European operation told DatacenterDynamics: 'Getting power the building is always a challenge in London. 40MW requires very specific infrastructure coming into the building. We've got two point of entry and they [utility Scottish and Southern] are providing feeds to both of them. They had a lot of work to patch them back into the grid.' The fiber provision was not an issue for the site which is two kilometers from Equinix's LD4 data center and from which 'lots of carriers' were run in.' LD5 doubles Equinix's data center capacity in the London area main demand for the space coming from Telecoms, finance, systems integrators and nascent cloud computing market, said Schwartz.

 "The opening of our 50th premier IBX data center is a massive achievement for the company and is a testament to our team, our services and the value we provide to our customers on a daily basis," Equinix CEO Steve Smith said in a statement. Equinix now operates data centers in 19 markets, with 50 of its own facilities and a Chinese company's data center in mainland China, accessible to Equinix customers through a partnership.

The new London facility, called LD5 IBX, provides about 291,000 square feet of space total. This is the company's second largest European data center after FR2 IBX in Frankfurt, Germany. It sits on the same campus as the provider's older LD4 data center opened toward the end of 2007. The two facilities are connected by diverse fiber links, which enables tenants in each to use both facilities to expand.

Foster City, Calif.-based Equinix is targeting financial service firms and providers of cloud-based services as customers for the new facility. More than 30 carriers, including London Internet Exchange, provide network connectivity services at the campus.

"For Equinix, continued growth and demand have been fueled by two particularly strong market trends: the need for financial market participants to locate in close proximity to each other in order to improve the efficiency of their trading operations, and the increasing uptake of cloud-based services by enterprises in the UK and in major markets around the world," Equinix UK GM Russell Poole said in a statement.