Ben Stirk

Head of Enterprise & AI, Ark Data Centres

With over 17 years of experience within the Global Data Centre Sector, Ben is primarily involved with providing hosting solutions for multi-national corporate and tech organisations. Ben’s main focus had been Tenant representation when working for agency/consultancy organisations such as CBRE, Cushman & Wakefield and Knight Frank in what is a complicated and challenging area of technical real estate and core to this was providing global colocation strategy and advisory, as well as a background of Landlord representation within the data center sector. Ben has now taken this skill set one step further and in his current role he promotes technical real estate solutions for Ark Data Centres.

Ark supplies colocation space to the UK market and over the 18 years of operation have become the data centre home in the UK to four out of the five largest Cloud providers, 5 of the Top 10 world banks, colo organizations, system integrators, telcos, finance companies, and some of the biggest brands on the planet. They are also home to the unique Crown Hosting Service, a joint partnership between Ark and the UK Government/Cabinet Office supplying space and power to UK public funded bodies and specialist services. To date, they have built six world-class sustainable facilities in key locations in London and the South of England and have secured future growth which will take them beyond 300MW of IT capacity, this is together with landing their newest site in continental Europe found in the Brussels, Belgium market.

To date over Ben’s working career he has personally led and been involved with over 250 global data center transactions, made up of acquisitions, expansions and renewals across EMEA, APAC & LATAM regions. This has incorporated advising over 35 clients in 56 countries in 100+ data centre markets around the world. Ben has so far advised on 220 MW+ of colocation space, acquired 180MW+ of powered land and disposed of 35MW of technical space.