Proposals for more office space in Salford have been scrapped in favour of a new £250m data centre in signs property developers are tearing up plans in a pivot to accommodate surging demand for cloud computing.
Last month, billionaire-owned property developer Peel Group received planning permission to construct a complex comprising storage and distribution, research and development space and offices on a 6.6 acre site next to the Salford Community Stadium.
But just days later, a new developer known as DLD (Salford) Ltd submitted fresh proposals for the site which involve demolishing the existing buildings and constructing a data centre, a move which it claims “offers a £250 million pound investment into the borough.”
DLD (Salford) Ltd was registered as a company just weeks ago. Two of the directors of DLD (Salford) Ltd, 69-year-old David Jason and 70-year-old Paul Velleman, have registered a host of similar businesses with Companies House in recent months in signs proposals for more data centres in the Manchester region could be on the way.
The company names include DLD (Merry), DLD (Manchester), ATK Data Group and Digital Land & Development. UKTN could not find evidence that either of the directors had any prior experience in the construction of data centres.
According to planning documents seen by UKTN, DLD says the proposals “will sustain the viability of the site for the long-term” through the “development of critical infrastructure needed to support the growth of data-driven and high technology industries in the area…Data centres represent an opportunity for commercial development that can meet the evolving needs of a modern economy.”
The move is the latest in a string of major data centre applications that have been submitted across the UK. Building work is already underway for a £350m data centre in Stockport due to open in 2026, while an unknown firm called DC01UK has laid out plans to build a huge £4bn data centre in Hertfordshire. AWS, which already accounts for around a third of the UK’s public cloud infrastructure market, in September said it would deploy as much as £8bn over the next five years in building, operating, and maintaining data centres.
The new Labour government is seeking to bring about sweeping reforms in the planning system to speed up the construction of major infrastructure such as data centres. In its “plan for change” document published last week, the government complained: “The failure of the planning regime has not just left us without the homes we need.
“Britain also lacks other key infrastructure that we should be able to rely on such as transport and energy, or gigafactories and data centres needed for industries of the future. It is slower and more costly to build economic infrastructure in England than other major countries like France and Italy.”
In September, the government placed the cloud industry at the heart of its plans for economic growth after it unveiled proposals to designate British data centres as ‘critical national infrastructure’ in a move aimed at ushering in a wave of fresh investment into the UK’s cloud market
The move, which is the first such designation in nearly a decade, places data centres on a par with water, energy and emergency services systems and will mean businesses sector can now expect greater government support in recovering from and anticipating critical incidents.
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