Oracle is to reportedly close its Linlithgow data center in Scotland early next year.

Citing ‘multiple insiders’, the Register reports the facility will close ‘over the next few months.’

"As Oracle continues its rapid cloud growth we continuously evaluate and adjust our infrastructure to best meet customer and business needs. We currently operate multiple sites across the UK including major regions in London and Newport, Wales," an Oracle spokesman told the publication. The company provided the same comment to DCD.

The site was originally a Sun Microsystems manufacturing facility opened in 1990. Oracle converted it into a data center in 2012 after acquiring Sun in 2009; the facility totals 160,000 sq ft (14,900 sqm) and 10MW of power.

Martin Biggs, vice president and general manager of Oracle and SAP support firm Spinnaker Support told the Register Oracle was using the closure of the Linlithgow facility to migrate customers from its legacy Oracle Cloud Managed Services platform to their Oracle Cloud Infrastructure platform.

"It's no secret that Oracle is undergoing a transitionary period where it is upgrading its data center estate in order to gear them towards the cloud and to compete with other public clouds such as AWS and Azure,” added Mark Vivian, CEO of Oracle support and managed service provider company Claremont.

“As it brings its data center estate up to date so OCI is the default, not all of Linlithgow's tenants will share Oracle's cloud-first vision, and some will be hesitant or even resistant to any change.”

In 2019, Oracle partner Inoapps agreed a five-year lease on a 7,500 sq ft office and a £700,000 investment in Linlithgow.

Oracle operates four UK Cloud regions; two each in London and Newport, with one in each city dedicated to government customers.