Brexit is positive says acquired cloud data centre owner

France’s InfraVia Capital Partners has taken a majority stake in UK data centre operator Next Generation Data (NGD), which owns Europe’s biggest data centre.

NGD founders Simon Taylor (chairman) and Nick Razey (CEO) will remain “significant shareholders” in the company, said NGD.

NGD opened its flagship 750,000 square feet data centre in south Wales in early 2010. The largest data centre in Europe includes its own private connection to the National SuperGrid, with up to 180MW of power (sufficient to power a city the size of Bristol) generated from 100 percent renewable sources.

NGD has attracted large multinational clients including a number of major cloud service providers.

Investment from InfraVia will enable NGD to “accelerate future growth”, including the expansion of existing UK data centre capacity and the addition of a second site. There will also be further high speed transatlantic fibre communications networks.

“We have been impressed by the momentum achieved by the management team and we believe that NGD is ideally positioned to capture further growth thanks to its unique offering, flexible expansion potential and high quality infrastructure”, said Vincent Levita, CEO of InfraVia.

Simon Taylor and Nick Razey will retain their respective positions as chairman and CEO on the new board.

Taylor said: “We have become the UK’s first choice for blue chip organisations requiring spacious world-class data centre facilities for reasons of power, energy efficiency, security and price.

“With the additional financial resources of InfraVia we will be able to take our business to the next level by maximising repeat and new business opportunities as global organisations continue to demand more data centre space and power for accommodating increased cloud computing deployments.”

In addition, Taylor stressed: “We believe that Brexit will possibly increase the on-shoring of data which we see as positive for NGD going forward.”

The size of the investment has not been disclosed by either side.

@AntonySavvas

Antony Savvas

York, UK-based Antony Savvas has been a technology journalist for 25 years and has expertise in all major areas of enterprise and consumer IT. He has worked for a number of leading technology magazines and websites and his work is syndicated across the internet. He also undertakes corporate work for some of the world's leading technology companies.