Virtus LONDON4, Slough

Colo-X analysis

Originally opened by Infinity in November 2013, this data centre on Liverpool Road had an initial build of three halls offering just over 2MW of IT load. The facility was acquired by Virtus in November 2015, who have since upgraded total capacity significantly to 110,000 sq ft or 27MW. Much of this capacity has now been sold to several large-scale cloud providers, one of whom is believed to be Amazon/AWS, but some smaller “retail” capacity such as cages or rack footprints can be sourced through Colo-X partners.

Virtus LONDON4 is located almost as far away from Equinix’s LD4 facility as Equinix’s other Slough sites such as LD5, 6 or 7. This makes Virtus LONDON4 one of a number of options on the Slough Trading Estate for users needing the same sort of quality, but at significantly lower costs per kW or per rack for any hardware that doesnt need direct ecosystem access. Hundreds of pairs of dark fibre already run between the Virtus and Equinix sites on the Slough Trading Estate making interconnection easy and affordable.

Virtus are one of the fastest growing UK data centre operators with a particular focus on large scale or wholesale solutions of up to 28MW to large or “hyperscale” tenants.  They now run 11 data centres across the London market offering a combined 180MW of customer capacity.  Some smaller scale retail sized capacity (racks, cages, pods) is usually available either directly from Virtus or often more easily via service providers, contact Colo-X for options in each site.

The company also launched Virtus LONDON3 in 2019, a 3300 sq metres/7MW extension to LON4.

Virtus LONDON4 facility description

LONDON4 is located on Liverpool Road, Slough Trading Estate. It was originally opened by Infinity Data Centres and offered 92,000 sq ft of net technical capacity and 230,000 sq ft gross space (including 20,000 sq ft of on-site office space for facility tenants) before Virus acquired the site and then upgraded its potential by adding a new mezzanine floor. Power is provided by dual 33kV incomers from SSE carrying 34MVA to the site.

Security is accredited to ISO27001:2005. There is good connectivity on the Slough Trading Estate for all data centre users. The first carriers on site included Zayo, EuNetworks and SSE. Virgin and C&W have also agreed to come in imminently.

Virtus have added even further capacity to the site through the seperate but linked LONDON3 data centre, offering 33,000 sq ft or 7MW of IT load which went live in 2019.  Our aerial image of the site shows the locations of the two buildings and other nearby data centres on Liverpool Road, Slough Trading Estate.

Virtus are one of the fastest growing UK data centre operators, with 11 massive facilities either open or under construction in the London market providing a combined 175MW or 850,000 sq ft of net technical capacity.  Their primary focus today is the 9 data centres in West London, with four of a combined 84MW in Stockley Park (LONDON5, 6, 7 and 8) and five on the Slough Trading Estate offering 75MW (LONDON3, 4, 9, 10 and 11), with the original small 6MW site in Enfield LONDON1 and LONDON2 in Hayes (12MW). Colo-X assumes that in Slough LONDON9, 10 and 11 are fully leased to single tenant occupiers.

Virtus became a wholly owned subsidiary of ST Telemedia in October 2017, an investment vehicle of the Government of Singapore, with Macquarie Asset Management then acquiring a 40% minority stake in August 2022.

Virtus have had enormous success in the booming demand from hyperscale cloud providers that has arisen since 2016 and most of their recent developments are believed to have been leased on a single tenant basis to these large-scale users. In the year ending December 2021, 75% of Virtus’s revenue came from just the three large customers (whom we would guess at being Google, Amazon and Microsoft/Azure), so demonstrating their focus on the very largest wholesale users.

Technical stats