Work starts on massive Scottish green data centre build

Work started this week in Fife Scotland on what will become the country’s “largest and most energy efficient” data centre campus. Queensway Park has seen contractors move on-site this week to begin demolishing parts of the former Tullis Russell paper mill.

This is in preparation for the construction of a state of the art development with an estimated construction cost approaching £150 million over three phases. Over 300 construction jobs will be secured during the build process and up to 50 full time posts created on completion, including technical and operational staff.

Queensway Park in Glenrothes will be the first facility of its kind in the UK to draw 100 percent of its energy from renewable sources with an IT load capacity of up to 20 mega-watts.

The campus will connect to the UK’s largest biomass plant and will feature high speed carrier neutral data connections stretching to over 7,500 kilometres across the UK with global connection points.

The Queensway Park campus is a joint venture between Edinburgh based developers County Properties Group and AOC Group, who are in advanced discussions with Etix Everywhere, an international developer and operator of co-location data centres to run the facilities and provide technical support.

Queensway Park director Alan O’Connor said: “This is one of the largest and most challenging projects we have been involved in and is the culmination of four years of carefully planning every aspect of design and resilience.

“We have built an excellent experienced project team who fully understand the demands on such an important part of Scotland’s critical IT infrastructure.”

The campus will cater for all sizes of enterprise with facilities for co-location and dedicated server halls covering some 250,000 square feet. Phase one of the campus should be completed and ready for occupation within around 18 months, and will accommodate up to 1,000 high performance computing racks.

@AntonySavvas